As posted earlier today on the BeagleBoard.org mailing list, the latest BeagleBone Debian beta images are now posted for broader testing at:
http://beagleboard.org/latest-images/
If you’ve upgraded the firmware on your BeagleBone or BeagleBone Black in the past, the experience will be quite similar, but you might find the eMMC flashing times a bit faster (~15 minutes rather than ~45 minutes) due to less post-installation processing. Using the 2GB uSD card image also flashes a bit faster and can be resized to whatever your uSD card size is using some scripts under /opt/scripts/tools.
Many, many thanks to Robert Nelson, Rob Rittman, Dave Anders, Cody Lacey, the Cloud9 IDE team and so many others in getting us this far.
Please take the time to give a detailed look over this image and report any issues to the bug tracker on elinux.org:
http://bugs.elinux.org/projects/debian-image-releases
While plugged in over USB, you’ll see the familiar BEAGLE_BONE drive with START.htm to tell you how to get the drivers configured if you haven’t already done so:
Clicking the link or visiting http://192.168.7.2, you’ll see the familiar on-board served documentation:
I’ve introduced a few bugs to the documentation (http://github.com/beaglebone/bone101 and http://beagleboard.github.io/bone101), so expect to find a lot of issues there. Patches are welcome as are notes in the bug tracker to make sure I don’t miss dotting any i’s or crossing any t’s. This is your chance to try to get some documentation into the system you’d like to see. I felt it was pretty safe to save the documentation as an in-beta item because it shouldn’t impact functionality.
One of the biggest new features you’ll see is when you click on the Cloud9 IDE link:
This is a pre-open-source-beta-only release of version 3 of their IDE. Down at the bottom of the Cloud9 IDE you’ll see a new terminal window that runs a full ‘tmux’ session. You can open up a bunch of these and it makes logging into the board and executing command-line operations *super* simple.
Cloud9 IDE version 3 now includes support for Python and the Adafruit_BBIO library is included in these Debian images. That means you can simply paste in your Python code and hit the “run” button, without any additional download. I checked this out myself by doing a quick LED blink using the Adafruit tutorial (http://learn.adafruit.com/blinking-an-led-with-beaglebone-black/writing-a-program):
You should also note that the /var/lib/cloud9 directory now contains a git clone of that bone101 repo (http://github.com/beagleboard/bone101), so you can start using the Cloud9 IDE to edit the content live. What I recommend is creating your own fork of the repo and sending me pull requests of any changes you’d like to see.
You can also edit C/C++ code in the Cloud9 IDE, but no ‘builder’ or ‘runner’ plug-ins are provided. You will, however, find the Userspace-Arduino code in /opt/source/Userspace-Arduino. Here’s a quick little exercise you can do to blink LED0:
root@beaglebone# cd /opt/source/Userspace-Arduino/arduino-makefile/examples/Blink root@beaglebone# perl -i -pe 's/13/14/g' Blink.ino root@beaglebone# make root@beaglebone# ./build-userspace/Blink.elf
For more advanced C/C++ developers, future releases should include https://github.com/jackmitch/libsoc.
Those familiar with Linux will also note that the init system is ‘systemd’, which has been helpful in providing reasonable boot times. If you are looking for the journal, you can explore it using ‘systemd-journalctl’.
Drivers and firmware for many common USB WiFi dongles are included, so be sure to report any that you find missing. An issue with the driver for the Logic Supply UWN200 has already been resolved since the release[**]. To test it out myself, I uncommented and edited the wlan0 entry in /etc/network/interfaces (including replacing wlan0 with ra0), shutdown, plugged in the adapter and powered up the board again. I also was able to plug in a TL-WN822N adapter I bought from Amazon and got it working right away.
This is just a quick intro to some of the experience and what we are focused on fine tuning. Please take the time to check it out and let us know about your experience. I hope you enjoy it!