Busy hands | Disquiet mind

Okay. Hi. Yes, I'm still here. It's been an eventful err, many months. But more about that another time. Maybe.

Well, either that, or, I only post once in a Blue Moon! (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Last year at EMF I picked up a BeagleBone Black (rev C). This week I actually unpacked it and powered it up. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the rev C ships with Debian installed, but that means most of the documentation online (and on the BBB) is slightly out of date. No worries; things are actually simpler now!

Even though it shipped with Debian when I tried to apt-get update/upgrade/install I got errors. So there was only one thing for it; flash the onboard memory. When I went about this I found that the source of online documentation was (is?) offline. And the wayback machine was only serving up some too-old files. Luckily I found a chap with a link to the most recent eMMC flasher image! I've said it before, and I'll say it again, yay for bloggers!

One thing that tripped me up; when writing the image to the SD card, on Windows you need to run the program As Administrator for sufficient privileges. Learn from my mistakes friends. Also, only hold down the SD button until the 4-LEDs start to flash, then let go. The rest is smooth sailing.

When you boot up, you ssh in (over the USB cable); as root, with no password. Set one immediately! Then you do all the usual configuration things;
set a nice hostname - vim /etc/hostnames, vim /etc/hosts
add a non-root user - adduser, visudo
setup wireless - vim /etc/network/interfaces (unfortunately it involves hardcoding your password)

(I got a raspberry pi wireless dongle to use with my cubox, and now my BBB. Poor thing has never meet a raspberry pi. ... Speaking of the cubox; arch linux turned out to be just too much effort. Will probably throw Debian on there as well.)

Then reboot, and if ifconfig doesn't show an ip-address try ifup wlan0. Once online apt-get update, apt-get upgrade. And just like that you have a fully functioning Debian server (with broken out physical pins) to bend to your will. I have to say, it is one of the easiest setups I have encountered with microcontrollers/embedded systems. And a good first impression means a lot. I look forward to playing with it more.

*edit 2015-09-16*
Setting up my second BBB was far more troublesome! I finally got it working; using dd in linux, onto an 8gb micro sdcard (my 4gb must have a .1 or .2 too small), and even though the file (from here) is named 2015-03-01 the installation reports 2015-07-17. Curiouser and curiouser.