Beaglebone Flash Image on Linux

The BeagleBoard website assumes you're using Windows in all of its instructions. I am running Linux Mint and wanted to update the OS image on my SD Card.

My ThinkPad has a built-in SD card reader. I didn't know what Linux called it, but I did see SD cards I put in show up in my file browser. Turns out you can list your disk drives with the command:

sudo fdisk -l

I got output like this:

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 3904 MB, 3904897024 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 474 cylinders, total 7626752 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

        Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/mmcblk0p1   *          63      144584       72261    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2          144585     7132859     3494137+  83  Linux

Then, I used this command to "burn" the image to the card:

sudo dd if=./Angstrom-Cloud9-IDE-GNOME-eglibc-ipk-v2012.12-beaglebone-2013.06.20.img of=/dev/mmcblk0

You might want to stick a "time" on the front of that command: it's going to take a while (a little more than half an hour for me). You can check on its progress by using ps -a to get the pid of dd, then send it a USR1 signal with sudo kill -USR1 pid. That will cause it to print status information to stdout.