Installing Roon on Beagleboard black

I have a Beagleboard black rev C coming today and will be trying to install roonbridge.

Right now I’m using raspberry/hifiberry combinations with dietpi and no problems. I have a new dsd dac and have had issues with USB on the raspberry so trying beagleboard.

Searching this forum mentions instructions from Chris at Computer Audiophile but the link to that article no longer works.
I’m looking for instructions and the order in I which should proceed. I will have a display and keyboard but not familiar with linux.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Is there not a dietpi build for it ?

Not that I’m aware off. At least not on their downloads page.

Then just install the latest Debian for Arm and add Roon Bridge - see the kb article on Linux installation. It’s really simple and pretty quick.

I don’t know which Debian for ARM to install. They don’t list a beagleboard. When I find the right image do I flash the image to eMMC or just boot from sd card? Where can I find this “kb article”? Thanks

BeagleBoard Debian images: https://beagleboard.org/latest-images

Linux Install in the Knowledge Base (follow the instructions for the Roon Bridge armv7hf easy installer): https://kb.roonlabs.com/LinuxInstall

1 Like

This image seems to be the correct one:

https://debian.beagleboard.org/images/bone-debian-8.6-lxqt-4gb-armhf-2016-11-06-4gb.img.xz

…but I can’t get the BeagleBoard to boot from the sd card, even when holding down the user/boot button. It says something about editing part of the file to turn the images into eMMC flasher images but it’s command line stuff and I don’t know where to begin.

OK. I have the image written to the sd card but it needs to be turned into a flasher image to boot from the card.

This is from Beagleboard.org

“To turn these images into eMMC flasher images, edit the /boot/uEnv.txt file on the Linux partition on the microSD card and remove the ‘#’ on the line with ‘cmdline=init=/opt/scripts/tools/eMMC/init-eMMC-flasher-v3.sh’. Enabling this will cause booting the microSD card to flash the eMMC.”

How do I edit the txt file? Is it done with commands on my macbook with terminal? if so where can I find instructions on how to do this? Thanks for all your help.

I was able to get a BBB working as an HQP NAA and described the process here. This thread sets out how to force boot from the SD card. It then uses an HQP NAA image though. With RoonBridge you would update Debian and then use the LinuxInstaller.

Vim or Emacs are common command line text editors. There are lots of guides to both online.

Thanks Andrew, although I gave up on the beagleboard and built a deskmini running ubuntu to feed usb to my dac. In the process I moved roon core off a NAS and to the deskmini with great results so far.

1 Like

David, one can download a “flasher” OS image which is already prepared for flashing to the emmc in the BBB. I downloaded the latest stable release of Debian (9.3) here:
https://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack_Debian#Flashing_eMMC

Halfway down the webpage they list various Debian downloads. I downloaded the image under the heading:
Stretch Snapshot lxqt
Flasher: (stretch-lxqt) (All BeagleBone Variants with a 4GB eMMC)
Kernel: 4.9.88-ti-r111

On a Windows PC I used Etcher to transfer the image onto a microSD card. Then inserted the SD card into the BBB, and held down the Boot button on the BBB while plugging in the power cable. Released button after 4 secs. I had a microHDMI cable attached feeding my HDTV which worked fine to monitor the progress. Went fine for me.

I then tried to update the OS to Dietpi using the instructions here, but I was not able to get that install to work. https://github.com/Fourdee/DietPi/issues/1285
I could not ssh into the BBB after the install ran, and no images showed on HDMI out. So, I had no idea if that OS installed properly. I went back and reflashed to Debian 9.3.

Glenn