EBC Exercise 03 Installing a Beagle OS

In this class we run The Ångström Distribution on the BeagleBoard. Ångström is a stable and user-friendly distribution of Linux for embedded devices like handhelds, set top boxes and network-attached storage devices and the BeagleBoard.

Here's how to load the Ångström image we'll be using on an SD card. First get a microSD card that holds at least 4G.

Download a copy of the Ångström image
Download a copy of the image here. You'll see several files here. You want to download ETC2012.img.bz2 and ETC2012.img.bz2.md5. The first is some 1.5G, so it will take a while. The second is a check sum file for the first.

Once you have the two files and the card, what you do with them depends on what OS you are running.

Writing an SD card via Linux
If you are running Linux type:

host$ md5sum ETC2012.img.bz2 host$ cat ETC2012.img.bz2.md5

The two command should show the same thing 6610e1ea35febc5e9016734213bdba68 ETC2012.img.bz2

If your results match you have successfully downloaded the image and can move on. If they don't match, try downloading again. If that doesn't work, contact me.

Next uncompress the image. host$ bunzip2 -k ETC2012.img.bz2 The -k says to keep the compressed file. This will take a few minutes.

Insert your microSD card in a reader/writer and find the path to it by running System:Administration:Disk Utility. You will see



The path is in the upper right.

Then enter (if you're using Ubuntu, note the use of the sudo command):

host$ sudo dd if=ETC2012.img of=/dev/sdX bs=256M host$ sync

Where  is the path to your SD card. This may take 10 minutes. Mine took about 7.5.

An alternative recipe is to uncompress and write the content to your SD card all in one move (again, if you're using Ubuntu, note the need for sudo):

host$ bunzip2 -c ETC2012.img.bz2 | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=256M

so that you don't have to uncompress the image file first.

Writing an SD card via Windows
The following instructions come from here.

To initialize your card under Windows, you can do the following:

After the image writing is done (this will take some 10 minutes), eject the SD card.
 * 1) Download and install Ubuntu's Win32DiskImager (also known as the win32-image-writer).
 * 2) Download and install 7-zip compression software. (Or use winRAR)
 * 3) Decompress ETC2012.img.bz2 image file using 7-zip (or winRAR).
 * 4) Insert >=4GB SD card into the reader/writer.
 * 5) Start the Win32DiskImager.
 * 6) Select ETC2012.img and correct SD card location.
 * 7) Click on Write.

Boot your Beagle
You should now have a functioning SD card image. Plug it into your BeagleBoard and boot it up.

While the root password used to be test, there appears to be no password on the root account in this image.