Since writing part one, this article was brought to my attention, it compares the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Intel Galileo, and BeagleBone Black. It pretty much shows the computing power of the BeagleBone and price are unbeatable.
I am affectionately calling this project “BeagleWall” for lack of a better term. If you haven’t checked out the shopping list, and want to follow along, I suggest you do so. BeagleBones are often back-ordered.
So lets get started. First, we don’t really have to install a new OS. The BeagleBone comes with Debian pre-installed on its 4GB of eMMC (think of this as a permanent jump drive built onto the board). I have a few reservations about using this as the main OS drive though.
When doing my research about flashing a new OS to the eMMC, I found that one of the errors that could happen was a result of “too many writes”. Flashing is the term used to refer to re-writing the preloaded memory, such as your phone’s operating system, computer BIOS, wireless router firmware or similar devices, so that the functionality is somehow changed. An example of flashing is when you upgrade an iPod/iPad/iPhone to a new version of iOS or your carrier updates your phone to a new version of Android. As if the “too many writes” error weren’t enough of a reason, when I booted from a microSD, I wasn’t able to mount the eMMC in write mode, which means no recovery without re-flashing the whole OS.
With that in mind, and the fact that I prefer Ubuntu, I decided the best course of action was to put Ubuntu on the eMMC and use a microSD card, that way if things fail to boot, it will still boot from eMMC, and allow me to mount the microSD and recover.
For something like a firewall or other server, I would never suggest anything other than the “Long Term Support” (LTS) releases from Ubuntu.
If you aren’t familiar with Ubuntu you might get confused by the names and version numbers. Ubuntu names its releases with alliterations and animal names, such as Karmic Koala, Lucid Lynx, Precise Pangolin, and they are doing it alphabetically (or have been since Dapper Drake). They number the releases by year and month of release. Thus 12.04 was named Precise Pangolin, and released in April of 2012.
At the time of this writing, Trusty Tahr (14.04) is the most recent release of release of Ubuntu with Long Term Support, released in April 2014, and specifically sub-release one, so it is numbered 14.04.1, and will be supported until April 2019.
I would prefer to have the same OS on both the eMMC, and the microSD card, for my own sanity. Because flashing the eMMC is done from the microSD, we will do that first.
First, go download the image you can do it with wget if you are using Linux. The MD5 sum is 06f12f0168946cf302e2f6b32e07e007, if you wish to validate the integrity of the file.
wget https://rcn-ee.net/deb/flasher/trusty/BBB-eMMC-flasher-ubuntu-14.04-console-armhf-2014-08-13-2gb.img.xz
If you are using Windows, you will have to unzip the file using 7-zip.
Write the image to your microSD card using dd, or something like Win32DiskImager. To use do this on my Linux machine, it looks like
dd if=BBB-eMMC-flasher-ubuntu-14.04-console-armhf-2014-08-13-2gb.img of=/dev/sdb
For the next part you don’t even need to hook up a monitor. Just plug in the freshly flashed microSD into your BeagleBone, and add power. The lights will flash sequentially, and then all come on solid. Once that happens, disconnect the power, remove the microSD. That is all there is to flashing the new OS to the eMMC.
At this point, I suggest booting up the new OS. Simply connect, the monitor, keyboard and mouse, and apply power.
The default username and password are
| Username | ubuntu |
| Password | temppwd |
If you want, you can change the default password, sign-in and change the password. You can also become root by using the command
sudo -i
It will prompt your for your password, and then you can use the same steps to change the root password.
Now it is time to make the microSD card in to an Ubuntu system, this is where we are going to put our firewall.