Installing compiled images onto Beaglebone Black SD card

10 Oct 2013

So you've managed to compile an Angstrom Linux image. How to get it onto the Beaglebone?

What’s the point?

So I managed to compile an image for the Beaglebone Black. The documentation is not bad, but it took some time to wait for some bugs to get updated in the git. This was thanks to VirtualBox and Ubuntu, as compiling on OS X was too painful. Compiling pretty much followed the basis instructions at the main website. And I could see the image files available (hint: look in the subfolder work and find the deploy subfolder.

But how to get this stuff onto the Beaglebone Black, and running?

Creating a bootable SD card for Beaglebone Black

Actually, someone before me has been considerate and shared his experience (locally) compiling and installing Angstrom for Beaglebone Black. This is pretty much a copy of what he does.

Because of trouble getting a USB cardreader to show up un VirtualBox, and the incompatibility of the mkcard.txt script with OS X, I decided to use the BBB itself to write the SD card. This is based on the standard firmware from the circuitco website. So that is the set of executables that I had available. I booted the BBB with a nonbooting card (so that it will boot from the eMMC). The SD card then is located at /mnt/sda. The beaglebone is also on the network via the LAN port.

Then:

#!bash
root@beaglebone:~# wget http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/demo/beaglebone/mkcard.txt
mkcard.txt mkcard.sh  
chmod +x mkcard.sh 
./mkcard.sh /dev/sda

cd /mnt
mkdir Angstrom
mkdir boot
mount -t vfat /dev/disk/by-label/boot boot
mount /dev/disk/by-label/Angstrom Angstrom/

df -h

This results in the following confirmation that we have stuff mounted right:

#!bash
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs          1.7G  1.1G  515M  69% /
/dev/root       1.7G  1.1G  515M  69% /
devtmpfs        250M     0  250M   0% /dev
tmpfs           250M  4.0K  250M   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           250M  252K  250M   1% /run
tmpfs           250M     0  250M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           250M  4.0K  250M   1% /tmp
/dev/mmcblk0p1   70M   55M   16M  79% /media/BEAGLEBONE
/dev/sda1        70M   512   70M   1% /mnt/boot
/dev/sda2       1.8G   35M  1.7G   3% /mnt/Angstrom

Ready for installing the images!

Installing the images

Simply followed the stuff from here:

#!bash
cd
mkdir installs
cd installs
scp -r pragtich@10.0.0.102user@host:~/compiled-image-deploy-folder .
cd compiled-image-deploy-folder
cp u-boot-beaglebone-2013.04-r0.img /mnt/boot/uImage
cp MLO-beaglebone-2013.04 /mnt/boot/MLO
tar -xmv -C /mnt/Angstrom/ -f Angstrom-systemd-image-eglibc-ipk-v2012.12-beaglebone.rootfs.tar.gz 
umount /mnt/boot 
umount /mnt/Angstrom

Then reboot and…

Test!

#!bash
root@beaglebone:~# uname -a
Linux beaglebone 3.8.13 #1 SMP Sun Oct 13 15:59:25 CEST 2013 armv7l GNU/Linux
root@beaglebone:~# ps aux
ps: invalid option -- 'a'
BusyBox v1.20.2 (2013-09-14 09:40:16 CEST) multi-call binary.

Usage: ps

So the smaller ps delivered by BusyBox is now active, not the richer GNU version in the default install. Running ps also shows much less processes:

#!bash
root@beaglebone:~# ps    PID USER       VSZ STAT COMMAND
 1 root      4680 S    {systemd} /sbin/init
 2 root         0 SW   [kthreadd]
 3 root         0 SW   [ksoftirqd/0]
 4 root         0 SW   [kworker/0:0]
 5 root         0 SW<  [kworker/0:0H]
 6 root         0 SW   [kworker/u:0]
 7 root         0 SW<  [kworker/u:0H]
 8 root         0 SW   [migration/0]
 9 root         0 SW   [rcu_bh]
10 root         0 SW   [rcu_sched]
11 root         0 SW   [watchdog/0]
12 root         0 SW<  [khelper]
13 root         0 SW   [kdevtmpfs]
14 root         0 SW<  [netns]
15 root         0 SW   [kworker/0:1]
16 root         0 SW   [bdi-default]
17 root         0 SW<  [kintegrityd]
18 root         0 SW<  [kblockd]
19 root         0 SW   [khubd]
20 root         0 SW   [irq/86-44e0b000]
21 root         0 SW   [kworker/u:1]
24 root         0 SW   [irq/23-tps65217]
27 root         0 SW   [irq/46-4819c000]
36 root         0 SW<  [rpciod]
38 root         0 SW   [khungtaskd]
39 root         0 SW   [kswapd0]
40 root         0 SW   [fsnotify_mark]
41 root         0 SW<  [nfsiod]
42 root         0 SW<  [crypto]
45 root         0 SW<  [pencrypt]
46 root         0 SW<  [pdecrypt]
53 root         0 SW<  [OMAP UART0]
57 root         0 SW<  [kpsmoused]
58 root         0 SW   [irq/150-mmc0]
70 root         0 SW   [kworker/u:2]
71 root         0 DW   [mmcqd/0]
74 root         0 SW   [mmcqd/1]
75 root         0 SW   [mmcqd/1boot0]
76 root         0 SW   [mmcqd/1boot1]
77 root         0 SW<  [deferwq]
80 root         0 SW<  [kworker/0:1H]
81 root         0 SW   [jbd2/mmcblk0p2-]
82 root         0 SW<  [ext4-dio-unwrit]
89 root     36536 S    /lib/systemd/systemd-journald
91 root      3428 S    /lib/systemd/systemd-udevd
94 root         0 SW   [kworker/0:2]
117 root         0 SW   [ext4lazyinit]
204 root         0 SW   [flush-179:0]
304 root      2976 S    /lib/systemd/systemd-logind
305 root      2152 S    /sbin/klogd -n
306 root      2216 S    /sbin/syslogd -n -C64
308 root      5392 S    /usr/sbin/connmand -n
309 avahi     3168 S    avahi-daemon: running [beaglebone.local]
311 root      1844 S    /sbin/agetty -s ttyO0 115200
312 root      1844 S    /sbin/agetty --noclear tty1 38400 linux
317 avahi     3052 S    avahi-daemon: chroot helper
323 root      4644 S    /usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant -u
327 root      2956 S    /usr/sbin/dropbear -i -r /etc/dropbear/dropbear_rsa_host_key -p 22
328 root      2332 S    -sh
331 root      2332 R    ps
root@beaglebone:~# ps

Done!