Installing Ångström Linux on BeagleBoard

We have been able to install Ångström Linux to our beagle board. Ran into couple problems. The first one was we trusted BeagleBoard Beginners wiki just too much!!

You see we learned that we should NOT set any environment variables while using demo u-boot image which was downloaded from here. In fact what we did is we created our own Ångström image (from Ångström site) and simply installed that to our Linux partition of our SDHC card. And it worked beautifully. Though I must say first boot is a drag, very very slow.

Ran to some problems again. It seems BeagleBoard only works with DVI-D LCD’s and we had a HDMI to VGA instead of a HDMI to DVI-D cable.We ended up connecting to it from SSH and installing our programs like that. We really don’t need an LCD any time soon. And to connect to it from SSH we had to learn it’s IP from terminal. So no problems there. And we were very happy with the outcome.

Installing python libraries; as installing python libraries go this one was a little tricky. You see it seems that Ångström doesn’t update its python libs that frequently. So calling the package by

opkg intall python-pycrypto

Didn’t quite work since installed itself to python2.5 directory. Had to install pycrypto manually. I hated every moment of it. I  than uploaded my own program and I was very happy with the outcome. The program worked perfectly.

Stay tuned for more updates on The Black Box project! Remember you can find it at http://sourceforge.net/projects/theblackbox/ .

Live coding!