We have now finished flashing the eMMC (built in smartcard) on the BeagleBone from Debian to Ubuntu. Next we will make a microSD card also boot Ubuntu.
I was asked by a reader, “why did we flash the eMMC if we are going to use the microSD the drive our firewall runs on?” My previous explanation apparently wasn’t as clear as I intended, so I will try to be more succinct. So here are my reasons:
- I am no longer fond of the official Debian installation
- I do not wish to have the distribution on the eMMC be different than the one on the microSD
- I don’t want to wear out the eMMC, so I wish to use it as a recovery option, rather than the main OS drive, after all a microSD is very easy to replace.
Back to building the firewall.
Download the image for the microSD card
wget https://rcn-ee.net/deb/microsd/trusty/bone-ubuntu-14.04-console-armhf-2014-08-13-2gb.img.xz
The MD5 sum is 3a5c1d6e85e3b9d7c2f9133fa6197097 should you wish to check it.
Flash the card like before, using dd or other image writer. We can simply write over the top of the card we used for flashing the eMMC, because that was only needed the 1 time.
Once this is done, hook up your keyboard, monitor, mouse, USB network adapter, place the microSD into the BeagleBone, and power it up.
Now it is time to make sure the software is up-to-date.