There are two ways to install Debian or Ubuntu flavored images released by the Linaro Developer Platform Team:

• Using pre-built images that can be dd'd to an SD card.

• Using linaro-media-create.

This document covers installation using linaro-media-create. Follow this link for simplified instructions on pre-built images.

First you need to download two release artifacts, combine them to a complete binary image and flash them on SD-Card:

• User eXperience root filesystem tarball that is board independent.

• Board package (hardware pack) that can provides the board specific bits like kernel, bootloader, board specific middleware, etc... You can follow this link to determine which hardware pack you need.

We also have archives of all milestone builds as well as daily snapshots. Note that the milestone builds were restructured in mid-2015 when they switched from being date based (e.g. 15.05, 15.06) to topic based (e.g. debian, openembedded). Note also that very old releases are migrated to the archives.

After downloading both artifacts, you can flash your image to the SD card by using the linaro-media-create tool.

Installing linaro-media-create

From package in Ubuntu (host)

The following commands will add the Linaro tools ppa to your system and install linaro-media-create:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linaro-maintainers/tools
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install linaro-image-tools

From a development tree or released tarball

Released tarballs are available at Linaro Image Tools Launchpad project.

You can also get the latest version using bzr:

$ bzr branch lp:linaro-image-tools

Once you have the source code, you must check the README file in the root of the tree and make sure all the required packages are installed.

linaro-image-tools uses qemu to install and run code while building the image. Make sure you have the latest qemu-user-static package from the Linaro tools PPA before running linaro-media-create.

- Install linaro-media-create on Non-Ubuntu System

$ cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
$ sudo wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/fboudra:/Linaro/Fedora_16/home:fboudra:Linaro.repo
$ sudo yum install linaro-image-tools

$ sudo zypper addrepo -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/fboudra:/Linaro/openSUSE_12.1/home:fboudra:Linaro.repo
$ sudo zypper install linaro-image-tools

echo ":qemu-arm:M::\x7fELF\x01\x01\x01\x00\x00\x00\
\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x02\x00\x28\x00:\xff\
\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\x00\xff\xff\xff\xff\
\xff\xff\xff\xff\xfe\xff\xff\xff\
:/usr/bin/qemu-arm-static:" > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register

# This is an example of how you'd use l-m-c to generate and install a Linaro image for a beagle board on /dev/sdd
$ sudo linaro-media-create --mmc /dev/sdd --binary linaro-TARBALL.tar.gz --hwpack hwpack_linaro.tar.gz --dev beagle

Generating an image for hardware

1. Insert your SD card into the host machine (the machine you downloaded the image and hardware pack).

2. Ensure you know the device node for your sd card reader. In the following example, we assume /dev/mmcblk0. If you are unsure of the device node of your SD card, remove and reinsert the card and type dmesg on the command line. The last few lines should give you the device node of the card you just inserted. Example line "sdb: sdb1 sdb2" shows node /dev/sdb had partitions sdb1 and 2. Use the node name in the linaro-media-create command line.

3. Set the environment variable BOARD. You can determine what values are supported by running

   $ linaro-media-create --help | grep dev 

4. In the directory where you downloaded the image and the hardware pack, run linaro-media-create

   $ sudo linaro-media-create --rootfs ext3 --mmc /dev/mmcblk0 --binary linaro-TARBALL.tar.gz --hwpack hwpack_linaro.tar.gz --dev $BOARD 

5. Plug the SD card in your board and boot.

Tips: Coping without an SD card

Generating an image for QEMU

Generally this is the same as for generating images for hardware, except that you use the --image-file file.img argument instead of --mmc /dev/mmcblk0 in order to write the image to a file rather than an SD card. See here for further information for particular QEMU board models.

Board Specific Help

Versatile Express

• Creating disk images

• Setup steps