Wanted: SD image for BB with 3.8.x kernel, shell and network but WITHOUT X or graphics

I have a white Beaglebone and I want to resume my NTP server project with the 3.8.x kernel in place of 3.2. I’m using Angstrom. The default SD card image has a lot of stuff I won’t use; my board is never going to run X, and there is a whole host of packages that I will not use. I’m also developing in C and I have no plans to use Cloud 9 or node.js on this particular board.

I used Narcissus to build myself an image, based on their “test” branch, but it seems to have an older version of the kernel (I’m away from my VM, but I thought I saw “2.6.x” in the tarball when I looked at it.) I want an image at least based on the 3.8 kernel that I can use opkg to get up to date on. (I have to build my own kernel and devicetree anyway for PPS support.)

I’m updating, on the BB, the current Angstrom image and I am trembling at the thought of going through a large package list and uninstalling what I think I don’t need (and, of course, finding out through omission of the packages I do need!)

Is there an easier way than this?

Thanks.
DM

Rebuilding Angstrom with the systemd-image target should get you what you want.

More details here:

http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/building-angstrom

More image targets here:

https://github.com/Angstrom-distribution/meta-angstrom/tree/master/recipes-images/angstrom

Cheers,
Jack.

OK. I’d know if it worked by now but the Linaro repo seems to be broken so bitbake is stalled. One problem I had with bitbake earlier was that I ran it in a Linux Mint VM and 20 G of space didn’t seem to be enough. The VM has 300G to work with now so I can’t imagine it won’t build. I have built 3.2.x kernels and cross-compiled C for ARM in that VM before.

I will report back and mark it done when Linaro comes back up and if I can get my new image to boot. Thanks.

I got tired of waiting for the linaro server so I edited the file sources/meta-linaro/recipes-devtools/gcc/gcc-linaro-4.7.inc to pull the tarball from a different server (https://launchpad.net/gcc-linaro/4.7/4.7-2013.02/+download/gcc-linaro-4.7-2013.02-01.tar.bz2). Bitbake is running fine now.

I’m going to mark this complete. I’ve gotten bitbake to run on my Linux Mint development VM and both systemd-image and virtual/kernel appear to provide the latest kernel (3.8.13 now). I have another problem getting my BB to boot the systemd image I created, but I’d rather start a separate topic for that. I was not a fan of bitbake before this, but I’m going to settle on it as I can do what I need to do (no kernel mods, but custom configs, device tree overlays and likely a few kernel modules.) Thanks for everyone’s feedback.

Dave M.

   I'm going to mark this complete. I've gotten bitbake to run
on my Linux Mint development VM and both systemd-image and
virtual/kernel appear to provide the latest kernel (3.8.13
now). I have another problem getting my BB to boot the systemd
image I created, but I'd rather start a separate topic for
that. I was not a fan of bitbake before this, but I'm going to
settle on it as I can do what I need to do (no kernel mods, but
custom configs, device tree overlays and likely a few kernel
modules.) Thanks for everyone's feedback.

[with the 2013-05-08 Angstrom image]

If it's not the space issue that's bothering you, you can tell systemd
to boot to multi-user.target by creating a symlink in
/etc/systemd/system called default.target. E.g.:

  cd /etc/systemd/system
  ln -s multi-user.target default.target

and then reboot or something. No gdm or gnome silliness running here ;-).