Booting Ubuntu on Pandaboard EA3

STEP1: Download the Ubuntu image

Use this link to download the pre-installed image of ubuntu 10.10. 

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-netbook/ports/releases/10.10/release/ubuntu-netbook-10.10-preinstalled-netbook-armel+omap4.img.gz

STEP2: Prepare the SD card

Insert the SD card in your PC and unmount it. Then use this command to copy the pre-built image on the card.

COMMAND:

sudo sh -c 'zcat ./ubuntu-netbook-10.10-preinstalled-netbook-armel+omap4.img.gz|dd bs=4M of=/dev/sdb; sync'

STEP3: Download and copy required u-boot and MLO files

For Pandaboard version A2 and later follow these instructions. In our case we had a EA3 version so we followed it.  

1.      Download http://people.canonical.com/~tobin/maverick/panda.tar.bz2 

2.      Untar with "tar -jxf panda.tar.bz2"

3.      Mount the first partition of the imaged SD card

4.      Copy MLO and u-boot.bin (extracted from the tar file) to the mounted partition.

STEP4: Boot from Pandaboard

Now unmounts the SD card and insert it in Pandaboard and give it the power. It shall start booting.

STEP5: Now use the same procedure to install OpenNI and Kinect that we used for BeagleBoard.

Reference: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/OMAPMaverickInstall