After I’d unpacked and booted my xM, I wanted to install a Linaro daily build on it.  This was actually fairly complicated for me because of a few bugs I ran into on the way, but as they’re all fixed now I’ll describe the way it’s meant to work

Basically, the instructions on the wiki are what you want.  You can download the latest snapshot from http://snapshots.linaro.org/10.11-daily/linaro-headless/ (which is what I’d recommend at this point; I can state that the 20100915-1 build works for me) or you can navigate your way to a more official release from https://wiki.linaro.org/Releases (but don’t use the Linaro 10.11 Beta — it has a not very serious kernel bug that makes upgrades harder than needed on xMs).

Once you’ve downloaded the file (using dlimage or just boringly) and run linaro-media-create with a command line like

sudo linaro-media-create --dev beagle --rootfs ext3 --mmc /dev/sdb \
    --binary ~/Downloads/linaro-m-headless-tar-20100915-1.tar.gz

(make sure you get the –mmc bit right!), pop the card into your board, power it up and with the serial console connected run “screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200″ again.  The Linaro image is slightly different to the one that comes with the board in that you get a root prompt directly on the serial console, no need to log in.

As an aside, when I want to boot on a different card, I usually type ‘poweroff’ on the serial console, pull the card out, pop the new one in and press the reset button.  I don’t know if this is the best process   There is a kernel bug that prevents clean shutdown after the card has been on for a while, but it happens late enough in the shutdown process that I ignore it.

Next up, I’ll talk about how I set up my cards for networking and general user-level hackery.