Setting up Beaglebone black - mottihoresh/Snoopy-Aquarium-Controller GitHub Wiki

I just received my beaglebone on the mail the other day, it originally comes pre-installed with the Ångström Distribution. Personally, I prefer to use Ubuntu, also I wanted to use the SD card as the main storage device, giving me much more storage space.

This page's purpose is to document to steps I took to initially set-up the board for development.

Getting Ubuntu into the uSD card

I have used Ubuntu running under a VMWARE instance to set up the micro sd card. I followed the steps at http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu

  1. Get the distro - I ended up using Ubuntu 12, instead of 13, because I had issues decompressing the file. wget http://rcn-ee.net/deb/rootfs/quantal/ubuntu-12.10-console-armhf-2013-04-26.tar.xz

  2. Uncompress the files tar xJf ubuntu-12.10-console-armhf-2013-04-26.tar.xz

  3. CD into the uncompressed folder cd ubuntu-12.10-console-armhf-2013-04-26

  4. Find out which storage device is the sd card sudo ./setup_sdcard.sh --probe-mmc

  5. Run the uSD setup - in my computer, the sd card was at /dev/sdb sudo ./setup_sdcard.sh --mmc /dev/sdb --uboot bone_dtb

The uSD setup can time few minutes to setup, if you encounter any issues, visit the page mentioned above for more details.

Installing NODE.JS

When I first tried to install node.js from apt-get, it only installed version 0.6.2 which is super old, I followed the instruction at: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-an-upstream-version-of-node-js-on-ubuntu-12-04 to make node.js on the spot. I will place a zip file with the compiled version on this repo later. The make step can take a very long time to compile.

Another possible solution: http://www.armhf.com/index.php/node-js-for-the-beaglebone-black/

Device time and locale settings

Since the beaglebone black doesn't have any RTC capability, I'll be using a cron job to update the time every 12 hours. to update the device locale do:

sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8' Then to setup your local time zone, first sudo suand thendpkg-reconfigure tzdata`

follow the instructions on the screen and you should be all set. type date to check the current time.

By default Ubuntu will try to check the date everytime the device boots, but as mentioned before, it might be a while before boots, so we will add a crone job to update the time for us

https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/NTP.html

Setting up MongoDB

Setting up MongoDB was really a pain in the ass, I probably spent about a day trying to install different distros. I finally came across https://github.com/skrabban/mongo-nonx86/blob/master/docs/building.md which was modified to work with armv7l architecture.