SD Card Image

[eoghanoh]

Hello,

this morning I wanted to update the SDK. I looked and saw that there is an entirely new Micro SD Image which contains the latest SDK so I thought I might as well do that - update everything. But it wasn't as simple as I thought.

I know that there is a new way to build the SD card and it's nowhere as easy as the last way of doing it.

With the old one:
Step 1: Burn an image file to the SD card.
Step 2: There is no step 2, it's done.

The new one is here: http://www.parallella.org/create-sdcard/

Agreed, it's not that much more complicated when listed out, but the issue is that I work with a mix of Windows and OSX. I can't create EXT4 partitions easily with either of these. I did a search and there are addon drivers and utilities that I could get to do it, but all of that takes time and investigation. So in the end I just downloaded the SDK and stayed on the December micro SD image.

I do have a small netbook with an SD card slot so I could dual boot it and put Ubuntu or something like that on it, but it's a lot of hassle to go through just to partition, format and copy files to an SD card. It would be great if Adapteva could provide the image file also - this shouldn't be a big deal to do. That way if people just want to use the new way of doing it then fine, and they'll have a smaller download, but an image file of the whole card would make it easier for people who are in a similar situation to myself. I'm guessing a lot of backers would use Windows and / or OSX and may not have a Linux machine with an SD card slot, and they've already waited long enough for the board, so doing this would make it easier for them to get started when they do get it (although the card will probably come preloaded anyway). I know from reading the forums that there were some issues where people couldn't burn the image due to dfferent types of SD cards, but I would guess a lot of backers ordered the accessory kit, which includes the same type of SD card. So for those people at least it would make it easier to get started.

As Adapteva ship the cards pre-imaged (and I'm assuming they are using the latest one) then I'm guessing that this image file already exists - I'm just asking that it be uploaded to the server.

Thanks,
Eoghan.

[shodruk]

I think it's possible to make a raw image that fits any (16GB) SD card.
I'll summarize the instruction soon.

[eoghanoh]

Well, what I'm doing right now is I've set up a Ubuntu Virtual Host on Windows with a USB card reader mapped through. Tried it on OSX, didn't work and Googling makes me think it's because VirtualBox on OSX doesn't support USB3 host ports yet even though the device is USB2. Anyway, its' working on a Ubuntu x64 host under VirtualBox on Windows 7 x64 with a USB card reader mapped through. Was able to partition successfully etc. Still, would have been be a lot nicer and quicker to just burn a readymade image.

Anyway, soon I'll be programming again instead of yak shaving (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog ... _that.html).

[shodruk]

Yeah we early adopter geeks should debug the OS ASAP and make it easy for others to use Parallella.
3 hours X 5000 people = a waste of 15000 hours.

[eoghanoh]

Yeah, this is all working fine now.

Now I'll use my previous post to set up the board again (viewtopic.php?f=13&t=935 - gdbserver etc). I think that should really be part of the default build.

Anyway, I might finally get to do a bit of programming today!