Writing the image

You should write the raw image to a blank SD card. Make sure you're using at least a 4G SD card (desktop image is 2G uncompressed).

Linux

Steps:

1. Place the SD card at your host computer.
2. Make sure the SD card is not mounted (just umount it if needed)

3. Identify the correct raw device name (like /dev/sde - not /dev/sde1)

4. Run the following command to write it:

(replacing omap4 and sde with the right values i.e. just omap for a beagle image.)

zcat ./ubuntu-12.04-preinstalled-desktop-armhf+omap4.img.gz |sudo dd bs=4M of=/dev/sde ; sudo sync

Some people have reported issues with this method. If this doesn't work, try the following commands:

1. gunzip ubuntu-12.04-preinstalled-desktop-armhf+omap4.img.gz
2. sudo dd bs=4M if=ubuntu-12.04-preinstalled-desktop-armhf+omap4.img of=/dev/sde
3. sudo sync

MAC (OSX 10.x)

Download the image and extract it with the system archive utility, you should get a .img file if the disk is mounted disk1.. disk2.. not - disk0, unmount it with the following code.

sudo diskutil unmountDisk disk1

Then use the following code to write the image to disk1 (not - disk1s1..)

sudo dd bs=4m if=ubuntu-12.04-preinstalled-server-armhf+omap4.img of=/dev/disk1

If you get any errors trying to run the following code then try reinserting the SD card and trying again after unmounting the disk, or try formatting it first with DiskUtilities

Windows (XP/Vista/7)

Download the image and extract it using WinZip or some other archive utility. Then use Win32ImageWriter to write the unzipped img file to your flash device.