BeagleBoneBlack Stock Debian from External HD

As an alternative to the official Debian images, you can install stock Debian Stretch since most features necessary for BBB support were mainlined. TODO What about other BeagleBone variants?

This guide assumes the Beaglebone Black was booted from an external MicroSD card with a standard prebuilt Beaglebone Black Debian image on it. Otherwise the path of /boot/dtbs/4.9.82-ti-r102/am335x-boneblack.dtb may need to be adjusted.

Now download with wget the debootstrap binary as described in Debian installation instructions D.3.2.

DeviceTree information about the Beaglebone Black must be copied over and *changed*: The Sitara processor in the Beaglebone Black has issues in Debian Stretch's Linux kernel with the cppi41dma kernel module. (TODO There probably is a less invasive way to do this.)

Open /tmp/am335x-boneblack.dts in a text editor. Find the lines:

Above these lines, there is a line:

Delete this one line. Then:

Add the partitions to the fstab. You may also use UUIDs or similar instead of /dev/sda2.

Note: When changing the fstab or the flash-kernel configuration later on, mount *everything*, chroot into /mnt and run:

flash-kernel will generate a bootscript that boots the Linux kernel via initramfs, unlike the normal BBB boot process which directly boots into the kernel. Booting via initramfs is necessary for loading the kernel modules for the external HD.

You probably want to setup basic tools like sudo and network, like this for example: