BeagleBone demo files


 Angstrom-Cloud9-IDE-GNOME-eglibc-ipk-v2012.12-beaglebone-2013.05.24.img.xz
 Angstrom-systemd-image-eglibc-ipk-v2012.12-beaglebone.rootfs.tar.xz
 BBB-eMMC-flasher-2013.05.27.img.xz
 archive
 changelog-20120509-20120618.txt
 md5sums
 mkcard.txt
 MLO
 MLO-beaglebone-2013.04
 u-boot-beaglebone-2013.04-r0.img
 u-boot.img

NOTE: The images and tarballs linked above work on both the Beaglebone and Beaglebone Black.

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

To the BeagleBone Beginner

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

How to Unpack and Boot the Demo Image - easy way

Download an img.gz or img.xz file from above e.g. Angstrom-Cloud9-IDE-eglibc-ipk-v2011.10-core-beaglebone-r0.img.gz (or a more recent version).

Unpack the image to the raw BeagleBone SD card.
NOTE: superuser privileges are required when unpacking the image.
eg. for Linux:

 
  $ sudo -s
   (type in your password)
  # zcat Angstrom-Cloud9-IDE-eglibc-ipk-v2011.10-core-beaglebone-r0.img.gz > /dev/sdX
  # exit

Or for the img.xz:


  $ sudo -s
   (type in your password)
  # xz -dkc Angstrom-Cloud9-IDE-eglibc-ipk-v2011.10-core-beaglebone-r0.img.xz > /dev/sdX
  # exit

Insert SD card into BeagleBone and power it up.

How to Unpack and Boot the Demo Image - the hard way

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, u-boot.img from http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/demo/beaglebone/ to the first partition
Unpack the tarball to the root partition of your BeagleBone 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-BeagleBone-demo-image*rootfs.tar.bz2
```
This assumes that the SD card has the root filesystem (ext3) partition mounted as /media/rootfs.
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 BeagleBone and power it up.

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...

My host computer doesn't recognize the BeagleBone serial port!
The standard driver doesn't recognize the vendor and product IDs, so it needs to be manually modprobed:
```
modprobe ftdi_sio vendor=0x0403 product=0xa6d0
```

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.

How to reproduce?

Angstrom is using OpenEmbedded as its buildsystem, to reproduce these binaries please follow the following steps:

git clone git://github.com/Angstrom-distribution/setup-scripts.git
cd setup-scripts
./oebb.sh config beaglebone
MACHINE=beaglebone ./oebb.sh bitbake systemd-image

If you run into trouble please have a look at the standard build instructions.