Bootstrap

Here are the instructions to download an image of Ubuntu Maverick and installing it on SD/MMC card. You may choose any Ubuntu flavor as you wish. We have chosen Maverick 10.10 here. Download any other flavor of Ubuntu from here: http://rcn-ee.net/deb/rootfs/maverick/.

STEP 1: Download and extract Ubuntu Maverick 10.10

wget http://rcn-ee.net/deb/rootfs/maverick/ubuntu-10.10-r7-minimal-armel.tar.xz

tar xjf ubuntu-10.10-r7-minimal-armel.tar.xz

cd ubuntu-10.10-r7-minimal-armel

STEP 2: Look for the MMC/SD card

sudo ./setup_sdcard.sh --probe-mmc

This would result in something like this-

Are you sure? I Don't see [/dev/idontknow], here is what I do see...

fdisk -l:

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes <-x86 Root Drive

Disk /dev/sdb: 7957 MB, 7957325824 bytes    <-MMC/SD card

mount:

/dev/sda1 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro,commit=0) <-x86 Root Partition

 Here you can see that /dev/sdb matches your MMC card specification.

STEP 3: Partition the MMC/SD card and install the Ubuntu image

sudo ./setup_sdcard.sh --mmc /dev/sdb --uboot beagle

Version	--uboot option
BeagleBoard Bx	--uboot beagle_bx
BeagleBoard Cx, xM, A/B/C	--uboot beagle
Panda Board	--uboot panda

STEP 4: Insert the MMC/SD card in SD card slot at BeagleBoard, connect the monitor and boot it. Use these login details:

Username: ubuntu 

Password: temppwd

STEP 5: Connect to Internet and install GUI and other necessary packages

sudo dhclient eth0

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

sudo apt-get install xfce4 gdm xubuntu-gdm-theme xubuntu-artwork 

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-omap3 network-manager

We also used ‘sudo apt-get upgrade’ in this step 5. It took several hours and resulted into non graphical interface. Therefore, there is no need to do that here. 

STEP 6: Restart the BeagleBoard.

Time to explore :-)

Since we had worked on Windows CE7 before, we thought of exploring other Operating Systems. Spending some time on this process was necessary as we want to test the pros and cons of various OS before choosing one.

We tried installing and booting the OS on BeagleBoard for testing purposes.

1. Angstorm: : We started with Angstorm with worked perfectly fine without creating any issues.

2. Ubuntu Flavors: Next we applied the same procedure of testing the image on Natty and Maverick separately. We came up with certain difficulties in this (discussed in the next post). However, we were able to resolve them soon.

3. Android: Considering the Android revolution going on at present with high graphic capabilities, we thought it also try our hands on it. This would help us later in integrating our product with State of the Art application, features.

Thus, we were finally able to successfully test install all main OS on BeagleBoard. During this process we learned that for an OS to successfully boot this process is needed-

1. Partitioning the SD card into two parts-

             SD card            : /dev/sdb  [4 GB]
______________________________________________
     Name                     Path              Space                 Type
______________________________________________
boot partition    |       /dev/sdb1     |    74 MB         |   FAT32
rootfs partition  |       /dev/sdb2     | Rest Space      |   EXT3
______________________________________________

2. Copying appropriate files into these partitions-

__________________________________________________
     Name                     Path                           Files
__________________________________________________
boot partition    |       /dev/sdb1     |   MLO, u-boot.bin.ift, uImage
rootfs partition  |       /dev/sdb2     |   vmlinuz
__________________________________________________


These four files are the main files for BB-xm we need 'boot.scr' too.