for other newbies, here is a summary of my flashing/updating experiences. debian is the recommend distribution now. (not ubuntu, not angstrom, not others, even though they probably work, too.)
the posted debian 7.5 standard releases are too finicky. I always got something different and weird. half the time it would just access both, half the time it would stop with all four LEDs black. sometimes it got stuck at its hdmi conversation. once or twice, I got a red-letter screen telling me that it was flashing, but it never got far. in contrast, when I tried the new console flasher release, debian 7.7 (the one that has an md5sum of 1a70...), I had instant success on both rev B and rev C boards. unlike the 7.5 releases, which had two partitions, this one has only one. so, let me recommend 7.7 to anyone like me. here is a summary of the upgrading process. the information is already spread in many different places, but here is a summary (again) for the google cache: * on your linux laptop computer: download the img.xz file, check the md5sum, use unxz on the image file, and dd bs=1M if=*.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 (where /dev/mmcblk0 is the flash location on my notebook). the dd should report that you copied about 1.8GB. on a $10 sdhc premium 32gb card (300x), this takes about 90 seconds. then sync (just to make sure). then remove and reinsert the disk to make sure that a linux partition shows up (it is called rootfs and is an ext4). umount it cleanly. * unpower your BBB. insert the sdhc. hold the button near the card slot, and power up the BBB. * the USB power supply on a dual-head USB cable is enough. * the display is active during the flash and can be connected to see the progress. it works, even if you only have USB power to the BBB. * with a fast sdhc card, flashing the console image to the eMMC can take as little as 5-15 minutes. * during the flashing, the LEDs blink in a succinct pattern back and forth. * four solid LEDs means you succeeded. four black LEDs mean you failed. on the HDMI console, it will state when it has halted. * if you reboot, you should see a nice penguin at the top left of the display. the boot should take about a minute. the default username (debian) and password (temppwd) are displayed on the hdmi login screen. unlike the ubuntu images, the hdmi display output on this debian is rock-solid. the USB "magic" (which makes the BBB claim to be a mass storage device over USB and which runs a network over the same device, so that you can even point your browser at 192.168.7.2) is not in the console images. however, you do have a full computer with display output and keyboard support now. if the tcp/ip ethernet cable network is connected during reboot, it will come up. this means you can then run "apt-get upgrade" and "apt-get update". when I figure out how to install and uninstall the usb magic (earlier posts), I will try to add it to this post. [thank you, robert, for having done the hard work.] -- For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
