Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Machinekit BeagleBone Debian Images


If you've been following developments around the BeagleBone, you know the new RevC boards with 4Gig eMMC are coming soon, and these boards will ship with Debian instead of Angstrom. I have been working to get my Machinekit binary images tracking the new BeagleBone Debian vs. the generic minimal Debian install used previously.  This means you can run Machinekit without loosing any of the BeagleBone specific add-ons like node.js, and switching between the Machinekit image and the official BeagleBone software should be fairly painless.

I am pleased to announce the first public Machinekit test image based on the new BeagleBone Debian release.  Download the image file, then check the md5sum.  This is a raw image file, so just uncompress it and dd it straight onto a 4 GB or larger uSD card, pop it into your BeagleBone, and boot.  If you need help writing the uSD card, follow the BeagleBone instructions, just use the image file above instead of the official BeagleBone files.

If you encounter any problems, please report them via the Machinekit issue tracker on github, or on the Machinekit Mailing list.  While this is the first public release, there have been several test images for limited release (check the Machinekit list to keep updated!), and it looks like things are pretty solid.  As soon as there is a final BeagleBone Debian build, I'll make a matching Machinekit version and post it on the Machinekit page.  There will even be an eMMC flasher version for those of you lucky enough to get a RevC board.  I've got mine on order, and am hoping that I'm near the front of the line!