EBC Exercise 01 Start Here

Setting up your hardware and software
There are three major things that need to be done to have the BeagleBoard ready to run for class. Hardware, software on the Beagle and software on a host computer. Here are the details.

The Hardware
I have a Beagle Board xM for everyone to use for the quarter. I'm assuming you have some hardware already. Here's the hardware you will need and where you get it.

From the Instrument Room
You can pick this up any time, even Monday-Wednesday of break.
 * BeagleBoard xM
 * 5V power supply
 * HDMI to DVI cable
 * serial to USB cable

From your own resources

 * USB keyboard and mouse
 * DVI-D display
 * micro SD card. 4G should be enough.  I suggest you have 2 or 3 cards since it's easy to mess up one and it takes some 10 minutes to reload it.
 * micro SD card reader/writer
 * USB to Ethernet adapter. The Beagle has Ethernet on it, but every time you boot it you get a random MAC address.  If you are running on the Rose network you need a fixed MAC address.

Software on the Beagle
We're using mostly open source software. Go to EBC_Exercise_00_Installing_Angstrom_on_SD to see see how to get everything installed on the SD card for the Beagle. Once installed, you will be able to do the first 10 or so labs completely on the Beagle. Yup, edit, compile (or make) and run, all on the Beagle.

Software on a host computer
Once we start moving into Kernel development we will need a host computer. Since we are doing Linux development, it's generally agree the host should be running Linux. I suggest you run Ubuntu 10.4 (LTS). The Rose Linux Users Group LUG has instructions on where to get a local copy so you don't have to download some 700M.

There are three options as to how to run Linux.
 * 1) Native install
 * 2) Install in a virtual machine (ECE497 Lab00 Installing Ubuntu in VMware Player, though you could also use  Virtual Box too.)
 * 3) Run in the cloud

The Ubuntu site give good instructions for a native install. I've had good success with running both VMware and Virtual Box, though my installation instructions are a bit dated. (Feel free to update them if they need it.)

I've been testing out the "Cloud" approach and it looks like it will work too. If you want to try the cloud, let me known and I'll ask CSSE to set up a machine for you.