Pandaboard demo files

 Name                                                                               Last modified      Size  Description
 Parent Directory                                                                                        -   
 md5sums.txt                                                                        16-Oct-2010 09:23  606   
 mkcard.txt                                                                         15-Oct-2010 12:09  1.0K  
 MLO                                                                                16-Oct-2010 08:18   20K  
 MLO-omap4430-panda-1.41rs+r0+gitr1f96474d8df8ebcd1d982ec89241f508775aceb1-r0       16-Oct-2010 08:18   20K  
 u-boot-omap4430-panda-2010.9+r0+gitccd0c67858c6e2807c695e2c8f545284cb871866-r0.bin 15-Oct-2010 12:13  143K  
 u-boot.bin                                                                         15-Oct-2010 12:13  143K  
 uImage                                                                             15-Oct-2010 12:14  2.4M  
 uImage-2.6.35-r90-omap4430-panda.bin                                               15-Oct-2010 12:14  2.4M

To the Pandaboard Beginner

These short notes aim to help beginners get a working Angstrom system running on the pandaboard.

How to Unpack and Boot the Demo Image

Format the SD card using mkcard.txt
Copy MLO and u-boot.bin from http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/demo/pandaboard/ to the first partition
Unpack the tarball to the root partition of your Pandaboard SD card.
NOTE: superuser privileges are required when unpacking the image so that device nodes can be created on the SD card filesystem.
eg. for Linux:
```
  $ sudo tar -xjv -C /media/rootfs -f /path/to/Angstrom-Pandaboard-demo-image*rootfs.tar.bz2
```
This assumes that the SD card has the root filesystem (ext3) partition mounted as /media/rootfs.
NOTE: unpacking can take several minutes due to the amount of data.
Find the uImage-2.6.* (kernel) file in /boot of the rootfs and copy the file to the boot partition as uImage. This new kernel is required to boot the filesystem reliably. This will replace your existing validation kernel if it is present. Before doing this step, you may wish to rename the working validation kernel from uImage to something else before you copy the Angstrom uImage file.
Ensure all SD card filesystem operations have completed (ie. filesystem cache has flushed to SD card) and eject the SD card from your development machine. Most operating systems have a "Safely Remove" action to perform this from the Desktop.
Insert SD card into Pandaboard and power it up.

NOTE: Use external 5V supply and remove all USB connections from the Pandaboard when booting for the first time. Try USB later once you know it works.

What to Expect

Watch the serial port output. You should observe the following:

The U-Boot startup.
Kernel uncompresses and boots.
Lots of kernel messages for up to a minute while filesystem scanning happens and the system boots.
At the end you should see a login prompt below the Angstrom ASCII-art logo. The root password is empty (just press enter if asked for a password). You can now login to your new Angstrom demo system.

What If...

Some common problems and their fixes

USB Ethernet doesn't work at startup.
The culprit is the composite USB gadget driver. In etc/default/usb-gadget set USB_MODE='networking' and run the module reconfiguration script (name?).

What Next?

Once you have a working Angstrom system you may want to connect it to:

setup networking via USB
bring the packages up-to-date via opkg
tweak the config
add your own applications

Time to visit the Angstrom User Guide.