BeagleBoard-XM

BeagleBoard-XM experiences

I've had a BeagleBoard-XM laying around for some time. Now is the time for playing with it.

Get Fedora on it

It of course boots on the included Ångstrøm Linux with Gnome. Works pretty good in fact. But I'm a Fedora man, so I thought I'll get a Fedora on the Beagle. A wish that introduced a couple of obstacles.

First you have to locate the Fedora distribution port to ARM. This is where I found the Fedora 18 release for BeagleBoard-XM: Fordora project.

I downloaded the hfp image and went to the micro-SD pusher down town. I grabbed an 8 GB card and at home again I tried to load the card as described on the project page. I issued:

$ xzcat Fedora-18-beagle-armhfp.img.xz > /dev/mmcblk0p1

with no good result :-(. The card seem to be corrupted. It would not mount or anything. Now what?

After formatting the card a couple of times I found that using fdisk to make it bootable and copying the file using xzcat to the main device - not the partition something came onto the card.

So

$ xzcat Fedora-18-beagle-armhfp.img.xz > /dev/mmcblk0

seemed to put something on the card after many, many minutes of waiting.

Next thing is to insert the card into the slot on the BeagleBoard, connecting a screen and cutecom on the serial line and power up.

The uBoot came up but told me that it could not find a partition on the SD card and refused to continue. So some kind of success, but not enough.