BeagleBone Black

• The installation process consists of creating a micro SD card from which to boot into Arch Linux ARM, then installing to eMMC if you choose to.
• In order to boot to SD, you must hold down the switch on the top of the board near the micro SD slot as you apply power. This will tell the board to boot from SD first instead of eMMC, and it will remember this until you remove power so future reboots will always boot from SD.
• The BeagleBone Black can draw more than 500mA through the mini-USB port, particularly when using an SD card. For this reason, we recommend using a USB charger that can supply more than this as opposed to a port on a computer.

SD Card Creation

Replace sdX in the following instructions with the device name for the SD card as it appears on your computer.

1. Zero the beginning of the SD card:

   dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M count=8

2. Start fdisk to partition the SD card:

   fdisk /dev/sdX

3. At the fdisk prompt, delete old partitions and create a new one:
   1. Type o. This will clear out any partitions on the drive.
   2. Type p to list partitions. There should be no partitions left.
   3. Now type n, then p for primary, 1 for the first partition on the drive, 2048 for the first sector, and then press ENTER to accept the default last sector.
   4. Write the partition table and exit by typing w.
4. Create the ext4 filesystem:

   mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX1

5. Mount the filesystem:

   mkdir mnt
   mount /dev/sdX1 mnt

6. Download and extract the root filesystem:

   wget http://os.archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-am33x-latest.tar.gz
   bsdtar -xpf ArchLinuxARM-am33x-latest.tar.gz -C mnt
   sync

7. Install the U-Boot bootloader:

   dd if=mnt/boot/MLO of=/dev/sdX count=1 seek=1 conv=notrunc bs=128k
   dd if=mnt/boot/u-boot.img of=/dev/sdX count=2 seek=1 conv=notrunc bs=384k
   umount mnt
   sync

8. Insert the SD card into the BeagleBone, connect ethernet, and apply 5V power while holding down the switch on the top of the board near the micro SD slot.
9. Use the serial console or SSH to the IP address given to the board by your router.
   • Login as the default user alarm with the password alarm.
   • The default root password is root.
10. Initialize the pacman keyring and populate the Arch Linux ARM package signing keys:

    pacman-key --init
    pacman-key --populate archlinuxarm

Installing to eMMC

1. After booting into Arch Linux ARM, follow the above steps 1 through 7 using the device /dev/mmcblk1.
2. Power down the system, waiting until all the LEDs go out:

   poweroff

3. Remove power, remove the micro SD card, then reapply power. The system will boot into eMMC. If an SD card created with the above steps is still in the system when it boots, it will boot to the SD card instead of eMMC.
4. To use the micro SD slot for general storage, simply partition and format the device as a normal drive. Also note that the card must be inserted at boot for it to be recognized.