I recently purchased A Beagle Board Black within the last week and now I get to use it.
Please consider me extreme newb status in that I ask you to please spell everything out if you have an answer as I’ve got several kids I’m mentoring even more frustrated by acronym-laced instructions than I
We’re quick learners, just from really, really bad school districts behind even Mississippi that think using a spreadsheet and anti-virus downloads constitutes a computer class. We’ve decided to get our own tech space together and will thoroughly use your advice.
I have connected a USB hub/card reader that I have plugged into the main USB port. My video is a TV which I set to not clip the edges of the desktop by adjusting the TV’s display settings.
I was extremely stoked to find that not only was the hub and reader running a combo wireless keyboard and mouse off of one port, but also displaying and detecting all USB drives plugged into it and the files inside. This is extremely ideal as the OS comes with GIMP and text editors, plugs into whatever HDMI TV in front of me; about all I need for my brand of craziness. Learning to use Linux on my own finally is a side benefit.
But upon trying to load any file from my drives into GIMP the unit OS freezes. I have to hit reset. Is it because I am running the OS off the “vanilla” setting/drive? Maybe it has no room? It doesn’t seem to . . .
I have noticed a few posts about getting the SD chip to read. And moving the OS to it. I have one blank SD formatted ‘ext4’ of 16gb I could not get it to detect, and of course as I’ve seen on this forum I can’t leave it in its slot at boot and expect the Beagle to boot.
I have access to a windows machine that can do some file operations if needed, but I travel a lot and I don’t take internet access for granted and I get frustrated by not being able to endlessly trawl the internet for up-to-date specifics on use of this superior-to-windows OS. And I must say this product forum and your gracious willingness to oblige us customers was what made me finally get one of these.
Ok, we have gotten an SD chip to display on the desktop as ‘Angstrom’ - I assume it has been formatted with the supplied OS properly.
In addition, the ‘MLO’ file was deleted using instructions provided. We now have ‘BEAGLEBONE’ and additionally ‘BEAGLE_BONE’ displaying as well. It seems to be booting from the SD chip. (Note, SD chip is 16gb, enough for a massive home folder in comparison.)
And unlike previously, the image (graphical that is) files do load (tested at 100kb .jpg), and more importantly display unlike before, but THEN the OS freezes up. Several resets the pattern holds tight but at least its prettier than before
Is this an issue with the USB hub no longer switching between data and keyboard/mouse? I cannot think of how to get both data and input otherwise. And how do I carve out space on the Home folder or wherever BB is storing info? Do I need to? If I write something on a text editor for instance, and save, where should it go?
So this appears to a problem with opening most files in general, whether on Home folder or USB in general. GIMP is most obvious, but certain text files ‘.doc’ opened with Abiword also freeze up.
A very small text file opened successfully off of home folder with Gedit. That’s pretty much it so far. Will keep trying later, may try to move to other OS using instructions elsewhere in forum.
on an off chance whats "free" tell you your memory is
i run debian om my BBB and have no issues
i am running debian on a 16gb sd card granted
i leave the stock angstrom on the emmc so if i am ever in doubt of
something i just pop out
the sd card and reboot
i dont bother to use the boot button and have a modified ///uEnv/.txt
file to allow me to boot from the sd card
if inserted
In addition to Wulf Man’s suggestion to run ‘free’ to examine your RAM usage, I recommend running the following in a terminal:
df -k
du -s -k /*
Also, are you powering the BBB with the USB cable? Do you have a working ethernet link over the USB cable?
Due to the size of your SD card it may be unlikely but there is a possibility that after running long enough over USB cable you can eat all the filesystem space with log files. The driver for the USB networking has been compiled with debugging turned on by default and the log messages create megabytes of data per minute. These commands will provide the info to help verify whether this is your problem or you have a different problem.
We’ve had the board plugged into AC power whole time, save the ‘MLO’ file deletion (we saved it elsewhere for later). In addition it has yet to be plugged into any Ethernet connection. What you said about it logging all the time makes sense, so it’s not from network either.
Ran df -k >>> It shows that ‘rootfs’ is at 41% usage out of 3gb blocks and same for ‘dev/root’. ‘devtmpfs’ is occupying 0% of 250mb blocks. There are 5 ‘tmpfs’ directories taking up 250mb a piece and not using any more than 1% of their blocks.
The three ‘/dev/mmcblk0p1’, ‘*1p2’, ‘*1p1’ are at 95%, 77%, and 78% percent respectively for ‘BEAGLE_BONE’, ‘ANGSTROM’, and ‘BEAGLEBONE’
Ran ‘du -s -k /*’ :
4576 /bin
4472 /boot
4 /dev
40440 /etc
166732 /home
41260 /lib
16 /lost+found
1375216 /media
4 /mnt
du: cannot access '/proc/644/task/644/fd/3 ': No such file or directory
du: cannot access '/proc/644/task/644/fdinfo/3 ': No such file or directory
du: cannot access '/proc/644/fd/3 ': No such file or directory
du: cannot access '/proc/644/fdinfo/3 ': No such file or directory
