currently working my way through RCN's eewiki beaglebone page here:
https://eewiki.net/display/linuxonarm/BeagleBone+Black
and for others who also teach EL classes, here's something i do that
seems to be a bit different from most presentations (and online pages)
i've seen.
most presentations seem to like downloading and building
*everything* (MLO, u-boot, kernel, dtb and rootfs) before getting
around to formatting an SD card, copying it all on, then testing.
when i'm presenting this, i prefer to do the creation and testing in
bite-size pieces to isolate build errors much faster. for instance, i
will get students to do nothing more than download u-boot source,
possibly patch it, cross-compile, then copy MLO and u-boot.img to the
SD card and try to boot that.
as long as the class has access to the serial port (i'm assuming
that), the only test they'll be making is if u-boot comes up, and they
can stop there and look around. they'll know they can't go any
further, but that's all right -- that at least verifies that their
build and install of u-boot seems to be fine, and if it isn't,
debugging should be easy.
once that's verified, move on to format the rest of the SD card and
copy, say, just the kernel and dtb file, then try to boot *that*.
again, students will understand there's no rootfs but all they're
testing is if the kernel seems to load and boot. and if it fails, once
again, debugging should be easy.
finally, add the rootfs. anyway, that's the approach i prefer, and
it seems to work as students like to be able to build *and test*
something fairly quickly, rather than just doing a massive amount of
work, and wondering if it will work in the end.
rday