BeagleCast 2011-03-14: BeagleBoard-xM rev C

Today's hosts are Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon.  Below are the show note links.

Links to the recordings

• BeagleCast-20110314.mp3
• BeagleCast-20110314.ogg

To provide questions or suggestions:

• Call +1-713-234-0535 or
• visit the BeagleCast suggestions form

From the RSS feed

• Running a BeagleBoard off of Batteries   
• BeagleBoard cases with a MakerBot on Thingiverse
• New SGX Graphics Driver Release 4.03.00.02 for Linux now available!    
• DVI-D to VGA converter for BeagleBoard-xM and issue to be fixed with the current BeagleBoardToys VGA adapter when using a BeagleBoard-xM  
• Kinect + BeagleBoard-xM (now need GLES)    
• Leverett and Wasson Win Texas Instruments Beagle Board Design Challenge   
• Toolchain, Check! Kernel, Check! - Cross Linux From Scratch 

Twitter badge on the blog page

• Lots of interesting #BeagleBoard tweets
• Follow the #BeagleBoard RSS feed news items on Twitter 

Upcoming events

• Tweet @Jadon for free BeagleBoard hands-on training on March 26th at Indiana Linuxfest going on March 25-27
• Linux Collaboration Summit on April 6-8
• Embedded Linux Conference on April 11-13
• Maker Faire Bay Area on May 21-22

BeagleBoard-xM Rev C HW and SW Update

• New release candidate from Angstrom
• FAT vs. ext2
• boot.scr vs uEnv.txt change is not welcomed by all
• Why won't old MLO and u-boot work with xM rev C?

Hot Topics on the BeagleBoard Google Group

• Mark Yoder's ECE497 class with some students using the Kinect
• Collecting Google Summer of Code project ideas such as the car PC project

Future topics and guests

The theme music for BeagleCast was created and provided by Alasdair Drake.

Ubuntu image writer simplifies getting start using the BeagleBoard

If you happen to have a 2GB SD card and you are thinking about trying the Angstrom demo that Koen has created but are scared of all the partitioning, formatting, and copying instructions you are finding on the web, then I hope I'm about to share some joy with you.

Ubuntu now distributes a tool for writing images onto USB sticks and SD cards for the purpose of evaluating Ubuntu. For those of us who use Linux on a daily basis, it serves largely the same purpose as the 'dd' command, but it runs in Windows and Mac OS X as well and has a GUI to help prompt you along the way. You can get the tool from:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromImgFiles

Additionally, Koen, a maintainer for the Angstrom Distribution, has produced an image under his demo directory at:

http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/demo/beagleboard/sd-images/2gb/

You'll still need a tool to uncompress the image (which is Bzip2 compressed), but the rest should be mostly self-explanatory. Hopefully other distributions will follow and more SD images will be available soon!