As you may know i got my hands on a Beagleboard-xM. This things seems so cool but is the most fustrating board i experienced. Perhaps that’s because im not that linux savvy.
From what can tell the most important first step in this stuff is booting the uSD(micro sd) card it came with. Which is simple… Make sure everything is plugged except power. The last thing you should plug is power… to avoid any voltage spikes.
Ok since i know my board works the next thing i wanted to do is create my own uSD card with linux and stuff. The way i see it is… YOU NEED LINUX… lets leave it at that. Without linux you will have headaches. I have linux installed in a VM and on a second PC/Laptop. I use the laptop for my work mainly because it has a built in SD reader which simplifies things a lot.
Ok from what i can tell the SD card has to have 2 partitions.
Partition #1. FAT32 (Should have BOOT & LBA flags) Should be at least 128MB to be safe.
Partition #2. EXT3 This should fill the rest of the card.
The FAT32 partition is what we would call the BOOT partition. It will hold the uImage (linux image) and some other files. Ill get into that when the time comes.
The EXT3 partition is what we would call the ROOTFS or Root Filesystem which will hold the actual linux filesystem and everything you ever do on this beast.
I would recommend getting a 4GB SD card for a good performance amount of space. What i will be covering in the upcoming parts are:
1. How to Partition the SD card
2. Using Narcissus to build a test uImage and RootFS.
3. Loading SD card with our newly built uImage and RootFS.
4. Creating scripts for booting the board and placing them on SD card.
5. Testing our creation on live hardware.
Wish me luck. As this is something im learning on the fly and plan on explaining here to help others. There is documention online on this but nothing that good to get someone started up from nothing. I have had my board for about 2 days now and still have not been able to boot a custom linux file system. So as soon as i can… you can bet you all will be able to as well.