I Can Run Android on my Beaglebone

Impatience got the better of me, and at lunchtime, I ran Android on my Beaglebone from my netbook.

The two steps are

1. Burn a card with software for it to run off of.
2. Plug the card in, power up the board, and use a terminal-emulator (or adb shell) to connect to it.

After I did them once or twice in class, it was easy.

Making the card is necessary because the board runs off of it. There's no flash with magic software on the box to burn in. Karim says that the manufacturer originally made boards with flash, but customers kept bricking them, so they stopped.

Jim Schilling scrounged up a brand-new, 4-Gig, SD card for me -- the ones I ordered don't arrive until tomorrow -- and I borrowed a burner.

Next, I grabbed a lets-see-if-it-comes-up, Beaglebone distro tarball, which Karim gave us and he tells me is also available here.

After an untar and a cd into the directory, I typed in this command to create a card:

sudo ./mkmmc-android.sh /dev/sdd

and waited about 5 minutes for the card to get formatted and populated.
The only touchy part was being really careful to make sure I was reformatting the SD card, not my hard disk.

What device the card mounts as depends on your own setup. So first, I used dmesg to see what device it thought it was adding.

Then I discovered that plugging in the card actually mounted it (looks like they come mountable, even brand-new), and mount would let me see what the device was mounting as. (It mounted the partition /dev/sdd1, but mkmmc-android.sh wants the name of the device itself: /dev/sdd.)

All this is done by this script, which documents the steps.  The tarball download and the burn each take several minutes.

After the SD card is burned, I put it into the slot under the board, writing-side down. I press it in until it locks, then plug the board into the host with the serial (USB-to-mini-USB) cable.

Next step? Connect to see if worked.

This post's already long, so I'll put that step in the next one.