old beaglebone black doesn't boot

[lumpynose]

I bought it shortly after they were produced. It has 2 gig of onboard storage.

It does boot to the flash card. Then I redo the steps to copy it to mmcblk1, but when I power it up the blue led between the power and ethernet is on solid, and the rightmost one on the other side of the ethernet is blinking slowly. No connection on my router according to the router's web page.

It's nothing urgent, I just thought I'd see if archlinux works on it.

[summers]

My original BBB still boots - but I don't update it anymore. The originally one with IIRC 2GB, and arch fills up the flash. So I'm only on the 5.4.10 kernel. However my Pocket Beagle (that can only boot from an sd card) has been updated regularly, and it still works.

Guess you could fix a uart 3.3V to it - and see what happens - I've never done this with my beagle family - as it always well behaved.

[summers]

wondering if I could update - which is very painful on BBB 2Gb. And now after "pacman -Sc" and I can update systemd, without running out of disk space. I guess arch arm is large to a 2GB BBB ...

[summers]

OK, finally just about updated. Had to clear out some directories (e.g. /var/log). Upgrade a few packages at a time, clear the cache regularly; and large updates download to user space (on the sd card) and update from there.

Anyway after all this, the flash is 95% full
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk1p1 1812668 1615104 87436 95% /')
So its very hard to install arch on a 2GB flash.

May at some stage see how to cut down arch, and remove things not needed.

[lumpynose]

Old geezer reminiscing: "I remember when ..."

Yes, I remember paying over $1,000 for a 1 gig drive lord knows how many years ago that was. Back when Pentiums first came out I think. And before that my first Unix system, the one from Bell Labs, ran on a PDP11/34 with 32 KILOBYTES of ram.

And I just ordered two 64 GB sdxc cards from Amazon at essentially $6 apiece.

[summers]

Thats when I feel old, my first PC only had 32kB of RAM, and loaded programs from a tape. At least the computer had a 32kB ROM with the OS on board.

I learnt on a computer with almost no Rom, so you had to first load the OS from a disk.

It was the days when you thought it was clever to hijack the system interrupt, and have it shift any " on the screen up a line...

Fun days ...

[lumpynose]

Heh.

Thanks for trying to get the bb black working. It was just something for me to try while I was waiting for the Pi I ordered.