Angstrom installation

Introduction

This tutorial will guide you thought running the Angstrom distribution on the BeagleBoard

The SD-card partitions

We will use an SD-card of at least 2GB. It's necessary to create 2 partitions on this SD-card. One partition will be used by the boot-loader and the other is used as file system.

Use fdisk or Gparted to create those partitions.
<pre>
partition 1 =
- Size = 70 MB
- File-system = FAT16
- name = boot
partition 2 =
- Size = remaining part of the SD-card
- File-system = EXT3 or EXT2
- name = Angstrom
</pre>

Make sure you format those partitions before continuing to the next step. (when you're using GParted, formatting the SD-card is performed by applying the changes)

Remove the SD-card from the PC and plug it back in the PC. open a terminal and type:
<pre> df -h </pre>
The SD-card should now show up as 2 mounted partitions:
<pre>
/media/boot
/media/Angstrom
</pre>

Generating a build

Go to the Narcissus website [http://narcissus.angstrom-distribution.org/ Narcissus website] and generate a build.

• Machine = BeagleBaord
• Select "Texas Instruments OMAP3x/AM3x family: Bootloader Files" at Platform specific packages
• choose your own options and settings
• Some useful settings and pakages
  • release V2011.03
  • regular base system
  • none SDK type
  • console only
  • gdb
  • Native (on-target) SDK
  • openCV headers + libs
  • nano
  • openCV
  • ssh server
  • NetWorkManager
  • bootloader files for BeagleBoard

• click on the "Build Me" button
• Download the generated .tar.gz file

Preparation of the boot partition

• Create a temporary directory in your home folder: <pre> mkdir ./boot </pre>
• extract the downloaded .tar.gz file: <pre> tar --wildcards -xzvf [YOUR-DOWNLOAD-FILE].tar.gz ./boot/* </pre>
• copy the necessary files to the boot partition:

<pre>cp boot/MLO-* /media/boot/MLO
cp boot/uImage-* /media/boot/uImage
cp boot/u-boot-*.bin /media/boot/u-boot.bin</pre>

• flush the file system buffers: <pre> sync </pre>

Preparation of the Angstrom partition

• copy the root filesystem

<pre> sudo tar -xvz -C /media/Angstrom -f [YOUR-DOWNLOAD-FILE].tar.gz </pre>

• flush the file system buffers

<pre> sync </pre>

Remove the SD-card

<pre>
umount /media/boot
umount /media/Angstrom
</pre>

Launch the BeagleBoard

• Insert the SD-card into the card-reader on the BeagleBoard
• Connect a 5V power supply
• Connect a RS232 cable and open a terminal on a PC

<pre>
settings:
Baudrate = 115200
Data = 8-bit
Parity = none
Stop-bits = 1
Flow Control = none</pre>

• Connect a LCD screen

Ethernet on BeagleBoard