Setup sd card for ubuntu on pandaboard

Setup SD card for Linux on
PandaBoard
P

Sagar Patel, Gunjan Gupta, Romil Shah

Setup SD Card for Pandaboard
Hardware Necessary:
 Laptop with Linux distro (Ubuntu 12.04)
 SD card (16GB class 10)
There are some issues founded in Pandaboard community that Ubuntu 12.04 is not
booting on Pandaboard ES Rev3. We also faced same problem. But we figured out
the solution by manually formatting SD card. This document explains the
preparation of SD card for installation of Linux on Pandaboard. We formatted SD
card using Ubuntu. Make sure that, all the installation work must be done on
Ubuntu and SD Card is connected to computer and it is not in write protected
mode. Pandaboard ES allows booting through SD Card but it do not allow through
USB.
First of all start terminal by Ctrl +Alt +T and write in terminal
mount

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It will show us all the memory devices connected to computer. Internal Hard disk
will be described as sda and other memory devices can be named sdb, sdc, etc.
They are further divided in partitions and hence can have numbering appended to
them like sdb1, sdb2, etc. We have to unmount all the partitions of SD Card. Here
in our case I have only one partition so I will unmount it which can be done in this
way:
sudo umount /dev/sdb1

We will list all the connected memory partitions ofdesktop by writing:
sudo fdisk -ls

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Now we do not have access to SD Card through Desktop but still we can access
partitions of SD card through terminal and can manipulate memory of SD Card.
For manipulation we need to do memory hacking which canonly be done by
entering in SD Card through terminal. For 16 GB SD Card and our purpose of
installing Ubuntu we have calculated number of heads as 255, sectors/track as 63
and as each sector have 512 bytes so on calculating number of cylinders = Total
size / Size of one head is 1930.{Number of Cylinders=
(Approx.)}
As our SD card is in /dev/sdb segment so I will write
sudo fdisk /dev/sdb

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∗

∗

= 1930


Now as shown we have different commands available to us for memory operation
on SD Card. First we have to delete all the partitions. In our case, we have only 1
partition so it will be deleted by “d” command. If multiple partitions are present
then selecting that partition and repeating “d” again will delete it. After deleting all
the partitions we use “p” to check that no partition is existing.

5


Now we will go in expert mode by typing “x” and we will have much different
functionality available to us for manipulation as shown:

Here, we will give no of heads by “h” = 255; no of sectors/track by “s” = 63; no of
cylinders by “c” =1930 and then will return to normal mode by “r”.

6


Now we will add a new partition by “n”. It will ask for type of partition, where we
will choose primary type by “p” and will give partition number “1” and initial
memory allocation size of 64 MB by “+64M” and sector size will be taken default
by just entering in command.

Now we will write all the changes by “w”. It will save the altered partition table
and will make sync disc and make it re-readable. Also it will take us out of SD
Card command prompting to normal terminal execution.

7


8


Installation of Ubuntu 12.04 image on SD card
Now we can prepare our SD Card with help of OMAP image of Ubuntu. This
image can be downloaded from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/OMAP. To be
precise
download
pre-installed
binary
image
from
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/12.04/release/ubuntu-12.04-preinstalleddesktop-armhf+omap4.img.gz. We have Ubuntu 12.04 download in our
Downloads folder, so we will enter in that particular folder

cd Downloads

Now write this script in terminal
sudo sh -c 'zcat ./ubuntu-12.04-preinstalled-desktoparmhf+omap4.img.gz |dd bs=4M of=/dev/sdb ; sync’

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It will start installation of Ubuntu OS in SD Card. This process takes about 5 -10
minutes depending on your processor. After this installation ends successfully we
will see number of records which were input and output, total bytes copied, time
taken and speed.

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Now, we are ready to insert our SD Card in Pandaboard and boot it for first time.
We will follow simple steps of installing Ubuntu just like the steps we follow on
installing windows in our computer. After all the steps are completed, we are ready
to do our work in Ubuntu on Pandaboard.

Authors
(1) Sagar Patel:
He is pursuing B.Tech in Electronics and Communication in Nirma
University, India. He is intern scholar at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology’s AITI. He likes to explore new ideas. Embedded systems,
digital signal processing and video-sound processing are his favorite fields.
He loves programming. He is a blogger at http://creat-tricks.blogspot.com.
He also owns a YouTube channel www.youtube.com/sagarpatel9556.
Contact him at sagarpatel.9556@gmail.com.
(2) Gunjan Gupta:
University, India. He is interested in Image Processing, antenna designing
and biomedical antenna. Contact him at gunjan101@gmail.com.
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(3) Romil Shah:
University, India. He is intern scholar at Florida Atlantic University. His
area of interest includes Image Processing, Wireless communication and
embedded system designing. Contact him at rams16592@gmail.com.

 THANK YOU 

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Setup sd card for ubuntu on pandaboard

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