Beagleboard demo files


 Angstrom-Beagleboard-demo-image-glibc-ipk-2011.1-beagleboard.rootfs.tar.bz2                         169M
 Angstrom-Cloud9-IDE-eglibc-ipk-v2011.11-core-beagleboard-2011.11.21.img.gz                          198M
 Angstrom-Cloud9-IDE-eglibc-ipk-v2011.11-core-beagleboard.rootfs.tar.bz2                             152M
 Angstrom-TI-GNOME-image-eglibc-ipk-v2012.01-core-beagleboard-2012.01.11.img.gz                      313M
 Angstrom-systemd-GNOME-image-eglibc-ipk-v2012.05-beagleboard.rootfs.tar.bz2                         64M
 Angstrom-systemd-image-eglibc-ipk-v2012.12-beagleboard.rootfs.tar.bz2                               16M
 MLO                                                                                                 0
 MLO-beagleboard                                                                                     0
 MLO-beagleboard-2011.12                                                                             44K
 archive                                                                                             12K
 broken                                                                                              190M
 md5sums                                                                                             4.0K
 mkcard.txt                                                                                          4.0K
 modules-3.0.17+-r115a-beagleboard.tgz                                                               9.0M
 modules.tgz                                                                                         0
 sd-images                                                                                           472M
472M
 u-boot-beagleboard-2011.12-r4.img                                                                   324K
 u-boot-beagleboard.img                                                                              0
 u-boot.img                                                                                          0
 uImage                                                                                              0
 uImage-3.0.17-r115c-beagleboard-20120125152700.bin                                                  3.3M
 uImage-beagleboard.bin                                                                              3.3M
 untested                                                                                            1.5G

You can find mirrors for the above downloads at beagleboard.org as well.

If you want to use the DSP, you need to add 'mem=99M@0x80000000 mem=128M@0x88000000' to bootargs for 256MB ram devices and 'mem=99M@0x80000000' for 128MB RAM device or 'mem=99M@0x80000000 mem=384M@0x88000000' for 512MB RAM devicess.
If you want to flash MLO and u-boot to NAND, these are the u-boot commands you need to use:
NOTE: in recent u-boot versions (e.g. 2008.10) the 'nand ecc' command has been renamed to 'nandecc', so without a space in between to compensate for that 'mmcinit' is now 'mmc init'

mmcinit
mmc init
mmc rescan 0
fatload mmc 0 82000000 MLO
nand unlock
nand ecc hw
nandecc hw
nand erase 0 80000
nand write 82000000 0 20000
nand write 82000000 20000 20000
nand write 82000000 40000 20000
nand write 82000000 60000 20000
fatload mmc 0 0x80200000 u-boot.img
nand unlock
nand ecc sw
nandecc sw
nand erase 80000 170000
nand write 0x80200000 80000 170000

To the Beagleboard Beginner

These short notes aim to help beginners get a working Angstrom system running on the beagleboard.

How to Unpack and Boot the Demo Image

Format the SD card using mkcard.txt. For example: sh mkcard.txt /dev/sdX, where X is the drive letter of the SD card. On systems like Ubuntu that would look like 'sudo sh mkcard.txt /dev/sdX'.
Copy MLO and u-boot.img from http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/demo/beagleboard/ to the first partition
Unpack the tarball to the root partition of your Beagleboard SD card.
NOTE: superuser privileges are required when unpacking the image so that device nodes can be created on the SD card filesystem.
eg. for Linux:
```
  $ sudo tar -xjv -C /media/rootfs -f /path/to/Angstrom-Beagleboard-demo-image*rootfs.tar.bz2
```
This assumes that the SD card has the root filesystem (ext4) partition mounted as /media/rootfs.
NOTE: unpacking can take several minutes due to the amount of data.
Ensure all SD card filesystem operations have completed (ie. filesystem cache has flushed to SD card) and eject the SD card from your development machine. Most operating systems have a "Safely Remove" action to perform this from the Desktop.
Insert SD card into Beagleboard and power it up.

NOTE: Use external 5V supply and remove all USB connections from the Beagleboard when booting for the first time. Try USB later once you know it works.

What to Expect

Watch the serial port output. You should observe the following:

The U-Boot startup.
Kernel uncompresses and boots.
Lots of kernel messages for up to a minute while filesystem scanning happens and the system boots.
At the end you should see a login prompt below the Angstrom ASCII-art logo. The root password is empty (just press enter if asked for a password). You can now login to your new Angstrom demo system.

What If...

Some common problems and their fixes

The kernel panics at random points during start-up.
Either use the 5V external power supply or use one of the multi-config-cpudile kernels. Sometimes the current via USB is not enough, but the cpuidle kernel should help with that. That comes at the cost of garbled characters on the serial console when it goes into a lower power mode.
Even with the 5V supply the kernel panics during start-up.
Ensure that you copied the uImage file from the Angstrom filesystem into the boot partition. Compare md5 checksums to be sure.
USB Ethernet doesn't work at startup.
The culprit is the composite USB gadget driver. In etc/default/usb-gadget set USB_MODE='networking' and run the module reconfiguration script (name?).

The USER Button

The USER button on the beagleboard is your get-out-of-jail card. It allows reapir of a "bricked" beagleboard. If you break the software badly like writing a broken bootloader to NAND flash on the beagleboard, the USER button allows you to undo the mistake.

If you hold down the USER button at power on, the beagleboard will look for x-loader and boot loader code in the SD card instead of loading it from NAND flash. Under normal operation the the boot loader is located in NAND flash. In this normal case the kernel and filesystem still usually remain on the SD card.

Once the beagleboard has booted into the kernel, the USER button is just an input which can be used for any purpose you desire.

What Next?

Once you have a working Angstrom system you may want to connect it to:

setup networking via USB
bring the packages up-to-date via opkg
tweak the config
add your own applications

Time to visit the Angstrom User Guide.