wait till you play with overlay files :)
On 2/17/2018 1:05 PM, Chris Green wrote: > Dennis Lee Bieber <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Sat, 17 Feb 2018 15:45:03 +0000, Chris Green >> <[email protected]> declaimed the following: >> >>> I have a BBB (well, I have three actually) all running old versions of >>> Debian (Debian 7 to be specific). I need to update to the latest Debian. >>> >> One could ask "which 'Debian 7'?" My archive has image files for 7.8, >> 7.9, and 7.11. >> > It doesn't really matter does it, they're all going to be unsupported > quite soon. > >>> So, I have written the latest Debian 9.3 image to a micro-SD card, >>> that was easy enough (though it would be nice if there were Linux how >>> to do it instructions on the basic BBB 'getting started' page). >>> >>> Now I'm confused. There seem to be conflicting instructions about >>> what to do next. >>> >>> First I simply put the new microSD card into my BBB and turned on, it >>> booted OK and I was able to ssh into it via ethernet but it was still >>> running the old OS, not the new one on te SD card. >>> >> As I recall, my original BBB (with an old version of Wheezy) required >> holding the boot button when applying power to get it to boot from SD card. >> Once I'd flashed a newer image to the BBB, it seems the newer u-Boot (while >> u-Boot loads from eMMC) would detect the SD card and complete the boot from >> said card. >> >> I'm really about a year behind in updating my units so this is from >> stale memory. >> > I think you're right but it's a pity this isn't all describd somewhere > as it's very confusing when one tries to do what the main BBB > documentation says and it doesn't work as described. > > >>> Searching a bit more there seem to be two ways to copy the OS to EMMC, >>> one involves holding a button down (but not clear which button) when >>> booting and the other involves editing /boot/uEnv.txt and rebooting. >>> However I'm still lost as to which works in my situation. >>> >> Early release images came in non-flasher and flasher images. A >> flasher >> image only required booting from the SD card to start flashing; and as >> mentioned above, that might require holding the boot button. >> >> For a few years now all stock images are provided as non-flasher. >> Booting from the SD card thereby /run/ using the SD card as the file >> system. >> >> For the last few images, I typically boot to SD card, make >> configuration changes (mostly: copy my home directory from eMMC to SD >> card), ensure it is working for me... THEN edit the uEnv.txt on the SD card >> and reboot to flash from card to eMMC. >> >> Remove SD card, reboot, verify it is okay. Install the SD card (do >> not >> reboot) and mount it (I recall one or two images about 2 years ago that >> would automount), reverse the uEnv.txt edit (returning the card to >> non-flasher), and then perform the procedure to repartition the card to >> make all the space available. >> >> With luck, once a modern image has been flashed, it will boot using >> the >> SD card IF the card is in place when power is applied -- without needing to >> hold the boot button. >> >> The other thing you'll encounter: Most documentation on device tree >> overlays and the capemanager will be out-of-date. Sometime during the >> Jessie images a conversion was made from having Linux load device tree >> overlays into having u-Boot load them before starting Linux. {And yes -- >> I'd like to find better documentation for those too: so many books were >> written for capemanager overlays and there isn't a clean example of how to >> convert instructions from that era into the u-Boot overlay era} >> >> NOTE: this change from Linux to u-Boot device tree handling may also >> cause problems -- having u-Boot in eMMC that detects an SD card during boot >> might not run if the u-Boot assumed Linux loads the device tree, but the SD >> card image is one that expected the device tree to have loaded by u-Boot. >> Boot button needed to get the SD card u-Boot to load then... >> > Thanks for all this. I seem to have got to where I want to be now but > I'd be surprised if there aren't a few more hiccoughs. :-) > -- 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]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beagleboard/d73d287c-704f-b90e-375b-5997f59b08cc%40gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
