December 13, 2013
Latest Angstrom Distribution
I purchased two Beaglebone Blacks in early 2013.
They shipped with:
Cloud9 GNOME Image 2013.05.20
This is discovered by connecting the USB cable, looking at the mounted
"drive" and examining the file ID.txt.
This runs the 3.8.13 kernel for the ARM armv7l architecture.
I am of course wondering if this is the latest distribution and whether
I can and should upgrade to a later release.
As near as I can tell, there have been 4 releases subsequent to 2013.05.20, and the latest
available (as of December, 2013) is the 2013.09.04 release.
See the first of the above for a link to this image.
To do an upgrade requires a 5 volt 1 amp wall wart and a micro SD card that is at least 4G in size.
You will also need a USB card reader than accepts a micro SD card.
You could also use a powered USB hub if you feel confident it will supply the required 1 amp or more.
Personally, I will use a 5 volt 2 amp wall wart I purchased for this purpose.
You should not attempt the upgrade simply powered over a normal USB cable.
You should also disconnect any ethernet cable, as it draws additional power.
How to do the upgrade
- Download the file containing the image you select.
In my case this was BBB-eMMC-flasher-2013.09.04.img.xz
- Unzip this file.
The "xz" extension is yet another compressed file format that has appeared on the scene.
On my linux system xz -d BBB-eMMC-flasher-2013.09.04.img.xz decompressed it.
I have to note that it was 373850348 bytes before and 3657433088 bytes after,
so compressing it was hardly worth the trouble it caused.
- Copy the image to the card in the card reader.
There are instructions for doing this using a windows or mac machine.
On my linux machine I would use dd bs=1m if=BBB-eMMC-flasher-2013.09.04.img of=/dev/sdreader
The "bs" argument is most likely unnecessary.
- Power down (unplug) the BBB and insert the uSD card into the slot.
- Hold down the "boot" button and power up the BBB.
- Keep holding the button until you see the bank of 4 LED's light up for a few seconds.
- Release the button and wait for maybe 30 to 45 minutes.
- When the bank of 4 LED's are all lit up, the process is done.
- Power down, remove the uSD card, and reboot.
Notes on doing the upgrade
I finally decided to do this 12-15-2013. I took a fresh out of the box BBB, installed the uSD card
and held down the boot button. I was confused because it acts like a normal Anstrom boot, the lights
are busy flashing, albeit with a somewhat different pattern now that I pay attention.
I was running on a 5 volt 2 amp supply, so I felt no qualms about attaching a network cable and
I could ping and even ssh into the running system. The 2013.09.04 flasher is still running a
3.8.13 kernel, so that is no way to discern whether the flasher is running or you mistakenly
booted the system from eMMC.
It also seems that if the boot from eMMC fails and there is a uSD card present, it will give up
on the eMMC boot and boot from the uSD card. This is nice, but confused me for a while.
It took 49 minutes to reflash my BBB with the 2013.09.04 image.
There were lots of lights flashing the whole time.
I was concerned because I did not see activity on the usr1 LED
(which is supposed to be uSD card activity), but at the end of
the alloted time, all 4 LED's were lit solid.
I removed the power cable, removed the SD card, connected my network cable,
connected my power card, and it boots!!
root@beaglebone:~# uname -a
Linux beaglebone 3.8.13 #1 SMP Wed Sep 4 09:09:32 CEST 2013 armv7l GNU/Linux
root@beaglebone:~# cat /etc/dogtag
Cloud9 GNOME Image 2013.09.04
Feedback? Questions?
Drop me a line!
Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org