Saturday, December 18, 2010

Ubuntu on Pandaboard

In pandaboard community there is already a decent amount of information how to utilize the hardware. There are ready made images running Ubuntu and Android (pandroid) on Pandaboard. I downloaded the Ubuntu image and flashed it to SD card based on the guide in omappedia wiki pages. The flashing and booting the image went without any problems and I was actually a bit surprised how easy it was in the end. During the first boot the installation extended the partition to maximum of the SD card so it took a while to get the first graphical screen. After booting the installation asked couple of very basic questions such as username, password, timezone and keyboard layout and did some configurations.

When the installation was complete the image was still missing the proprietary components for example WiFi, BT and graphics firmwares and some hardware accelerated codecs for video playback. Installing these took over an hour with me setup (Class 6 SD card).

The ubuntu works quite well on pandaboard I haven't used it much yet so can't give very extensive report, but there are couple of things that I noticed that are bothering me currently. First of all the usage is a bit sluggish to which the rootfs change to USB HDD could help, so that is one of the next things to try. The second thing is that the WLAN MAC address is not static but changes on every boot so it is not possible to set the static IP to my DHCP server for this. There might be a solution for this MAC address problem already but I have not looked so much into that yet.

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