Hi,
Over at [1] you can find a demo image that fits nicely into the nand of a revision C beagleboard with some 80MiB spare to install extra things. It is an Enlightenment based desktop with Midori as webbrowser, NetworkManager as well, the network manager, a VNc server is started by default and Jasons test scripts are included as well.
If you have requests for packages to get added or removed, let me know, but keep in mind there's only 256MiB of NAND and the LZO compression in ubifs doesn't do much for binaries.
Flashing the easy way:
1) download [4]
2) bunzip rootfs.dd.img
3) dd if=rootfs.dd.img of=/dev/sdX, where X is the actual device of the SD card in your cardreader.
4) insert into beagle and boot
5) Watch serial for the reboot instruction of wait 15 minutes before rebooting
Flashing the harder way:
1) make your own SD card with MLO, u-boot.bin, uImage, rootfs.ubi and boot.scr
2) insert into beagle and boot
3) Watch serial for the reboot instruction of wait 15 minutes before rebooting
Flashing the even harder way:
1) use the tar.bz2 to make your own ubi file, etc, etc
For the curious, the README at [2] explains how the flashing works and how to reproduce it on your own.
For people wanting to see what's inside the image, look at package sizes and dependencies, have a look at [3]. It also works on xM using an microSD card, feel free to use the tar.bz2 for that.
regards,
Koen
[1] http://dominion.thruhere.net/koen/angstrom/beagleboard/flasher/
[2] http://dominion.thruhere.net/koen/angstrom/beagleboard/flasher/README
[3] http://git.angstrom-distribution.org/cgi-bin/cgit.cgi/testlab/tree/beagleboard/Beagleboard-NAND-image
[4] http://dominion.thruhere.net/koen/angstrom/beagleboard/flasher/rootfs.dd.img.bz2
I tried following these steps and sadly it failed on my [old] rev-C3 board.
Here's what I see:
Hi,
Over at [1] you can find a demo image that fits nicely into the nand of a revision C beagleboard with some 80MiB spare to install extra things. It is an Enlightenment based desktop with Midori as webbrowser, NetworkManager as well, the network manager, a VNc server is started by default and Jasons test scripts are included as well.
If you have requests for packages to get added or removed, let me know, but keep in mind there's only 256MiB of NAND and the LZO compression in ubifs doesn't do much for binaries.
Flashing the easy way:
1) download [4]
2) bunzip rootfs.dd.img
3) dd if=rootfs.dd.img of=/dev/sdX, where X is the actual device of the SD card in your cardreader.
4) insert into beagle and boot
5) Watch serial for the reboot instruction of wait 15 minutes before rebooting
I tried following these steps and sadly it failed on my [old] rev-C3 board.
Here's what I see:
Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.4.2 (Feb 19 2009 - 12:01:24)
Reading boot sector
Loading u-boot.bin from mmc
U-Boot 2010.03 (Feb 20 2011 - 20:15:58)
OMAP3530-GP ES3.0, CPU-OPP2, L3-165MHz, Max clock-600Mhz
OMAP3 Beagle board + LPDDR/NAND
I2C: ready
It hangs at this point. I know that this is the "new U-Boot, old MLO" problem,
but there is an MLO on the SD card which does not seem to be used. I even tried
holding down the user button during boot, but I can't get it to boot the new MLO.
Ideas on what else I can do?
Yes, it's right below:
What an absolutely worthless reply 
I already tried rebuilding the FAT portion
of the SD card, carefully copying MLO first, etc. Still no joy.
Exactly which of the steps below will solve the problem and how?
I managed to get this going, more or less following the instructions at
http://dominion.thruhere.net/koen/angstrom/beagleboard/flasher/README
I had to modify the mkcard.txt script as it does not make a large enough FAT
partition on the SD card to hold everything.
# diff -u mkcard.txt{~,}
--- mkcard.txt~ 2010-07-29 02:40:18.000000000 -0600
+++ mkcard.txt 2011-02-23 07:30:53.000000000 -0700
@@ -26,7 +26,7 @@
echo CYLINDERS - $CYLINDERS
{
-echo ,9,0x0C,*
+echo ,29,0x0C,*
echo ,-
} | sfdisk -D -H 255 -S 63 -C $CYLINDERS $DRIVE
Once I did hat, I copied the files to the disk like this (this info is strikingly
missing from the README)
# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/disk
# cp MLO /mnt/disk
# cp boot.scr u-boot.bin uImage rootfs.ubi /mnt/disk
# umount /mnt/disk
Finally I was able to boot and reprogram the NAND 
Sadly, I still have problems. First, I get this error during boot:
I confirmed that the image isn’t bootable. It seems mkcard wasn’t used to create it, so we’d need to either recreate it or hack it to make it work. I’ve been wanting to play with ‘dd’ a bit to see if I can make a card image bootable, so I took this opportunity.
$ hexdump rootfs.dd.img | head | tee MBR.txt
0000000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
In case you missed the edit, because I failed to point it out, it is in the above line. I changed the most significant bit in byte 0x1be.
Hi,
Over at [1] you can find a demo image that fits nicely into the nand of a revision C beagleboard with some 80MiB spare to install extra things. It is an Enlightenment based desktop with Midori as webbrowser, NetworkManager as well, the network manager, a VNc server is started by default and Jasons test scripts are included as well.
If you have requests for packages to get added or removed, let me know, but keep in mind there’s only 256MiB of NAND and the LZO compression in ubifs doesn’t do much for binaries.
Thanks for installing the test scripts. Here’s my list (focused on getting the test scripts to work and then for the Matrix launcher with demos):
- sox
- alsa-utils-aplay
- ti-dsplink-examples
- i2c-tools
- memtester
- cpuburn-neon
- evtest
- matrix-gui
- kernel-module-omaplfb (not sure about the conflicts generated by this)
- kernel-module-bufferclass-ti
- matrix-gui-autostart
This isn’t all that big until you start to bring in Matrix, which brings in a bunch of Qt and SGX code. I still show 44M free after installing all of this.
Since so few applications seem to really work with pulseaudio, should we boot with it disabled?
Also, is it possible to use a newer kernel? I’m currently trying out the one at http://dominion.thruhere.net/koen/angstrom/beagleboard/wl1271/ and will let you know how that goes.
Lastely, I’ve found that the Zippy Ethernet driver crashes when I run VNC.
Hi,
Over at [1] you can find a demo image that fits nicely into the nand of a revision C beagleboard with some 80MiB spare to install extra things. It is an Enlightenment based desktop with Midori as webbrowser, NetworkManager as well, the network manager, a VNc server is started by default and Jasons test scripts are included as well.
If you have requests for packages to get added or removed, let me know, but keep in mind there’s only 256MiB of NAND and the LZO compression in ubifs doesn’t do much for binaries.
Thanks for installing the test scripts. Here’s my list (focused on getting the test scripts to work and then for the Matrix launcher with demos):
- sox
- alsa-utils-aplay
- ti-dsplink-examples
- i2c-tools
- memtester
- cpuburn-neon
- evtest
- matrix-gui
- kernel-module-omaplfb (not sure about the conflicts generated by this)
- kernel-module-bufferclass-ti
- matrix-gui-autostart
Based on trying to update the kernel, I’d also recommend:
Hi,
Over at [1] you can find a demo image that fits nicely into the nand of a revision C beagleboard with some 80MiB spare to install extra things. It is an Enlightenment based desktop with Midori as webbrowser, NetworkManager as well, the network manager, a VNc server is started by default and Jasons test scripts are included as well.
If you have requests for packages to get added or removed, let me know, but keep in mind there’s only 256MiB of NAND and the LZO compression in ubifs doesn’t do much for binaries.
Thanks for installing the test scripts. Here’s my list (focused on getting the test scripts to work and then for the Matrix launcher with demos):
- sox
- alsa-utils-aplay
- ti-dsplink-examples
- i2c-tools
- memtester
- cpuburn-neon
- evtest
- matrix-gui
- kernel-module-omaplfb (not sure about the conflicts generated by this)
- kernel-module-bufferclass-ti
- matrix-gui-autostart
Based on trying to update the kernel, I’d also recommend:
From a recovery and editing standpoint, I believe that the fw_printenv/fw_setenv utilities are also required. I don’t know if these are part of the current u-boot recipe. For that matter, u-boot needs to be updated to include many recent features. I’ll let you know if I start going down the path of updating any recipes.