Beaglebone

Official website

Basic

Wiki

• http://elinux.org/BeagleBone
• Downloading images and instruction from www.armhf.com
• Adafruit learning which includes flashing eMMC and other stuff.
• http://eewiki.net/display/linuxonarm/BeagleBone+Black covers a lot about BBB.

Ubuntu

• Image (~70MB) download http://www.armhf.com/index.php/download/ and how to write the image to microSD card , boot from microSD and then the internal eMMC under Ubuntu/Debian.
• Defautl username=ubuntu, password=ubuntu
• http://robotic-controls.com/learn/beaglebone/beaglebone-black-ubuntu

flashing eMMC

Hold the "User Boot" button down, and then plug in the power (USB or 5V adaptor). Keep holding down the button until you see the bank of 4 LED's light up for a few seconds. You can now release the button.

It will take anywhere from 30-45 minutes to flash the image onto the on-board chip. Once it's done, the bank of 4 LED's to the right of the Ethernet will all stay lit up at the same time. You can then power down your BeagleBone Black.

Remove the SD Card, and power up your BeagleBone Black.

My Observation

When I use the image BBB-eMMC-flasher-2013.06.20.img to put it on the microSD card with win32DiskImager, I see (from plugging SD in Ubuntu) the microSD card has 2 partitions

eMMC-Flasher  -ext4
BEAGLE_BONE - vfat

where eMMC-Flasher contains an ubuntu data and BEAGLE_BONE contains only 4 files.

ID.txt - just one line
MLO - 98K binary
u-boot.img - 371K binary
uEnv.txt - just one line

Flashing is done by pressing the 'Boot' button while connecting the power. It took 1 hour in my case when I flashed BBB-eMMC-flasher-2013.06.20.img.

However, once the microSD is flashed to eMMC, the 'eMMC-Flasher' partition will be gone and 'BEAGLE_BONE' partition is changed to include 3 new folders- App, Docs and Drivers AND some new files - START.htm, autorun.inf, README.md.

Android OS

http://icculus.org/~hendersa/android/

Configure Angstrom

http://www.gigamegablog.com/2012/01/29/beaglebone-linux-101-configuring-angstrom-linux/

Package download

opkg update
opkg install XXXX
opkg list | grep "gfortran"

However, at least for BBB case, I cannot find gfortran package so I cannot install R. See discussions below

• http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/78676/opkg-cant-find-apache

The angstrom linux package browser is the place we can see if packages for BBB Cortex-A8. According to Wikipedia the Cortex-A8 has armv7a architecture.

On ubuntu, we can use ldconfig -v command to show the installed libraries and their versions. See here. If we like to manually add libraries to ubuntu/debian, we can check the tip here.

Ubuntu

Find out the IP address if we use internet sharing

Download fing deb package from overlooksoft website. Install it by double clicking the file in file manager. Issue the following command to find out the IP of beaglebone black (shared computer).

sudo fing -n 10.42.0.1/24

VNC

• http://digitaldiner.blogspot.com/2013/05/quick-hint-for-beaglebone-black-user.html

opkg update
opkg install x11vnc

x11vnc -bg -o %HOME/.x11vnc.log.%VNCDISPLAY -auth /var/run/gdm/auth-for-gdm*/database -display :0  -forever

Use microSD as ext storage

It is possible. See the idea in here.