One of the first things to do is to upgrade the Linux embedded in the BeagleBone Black device, The documentation provided for Windows is not exactly clear and complete for Linux, so here is the process à followed :

• The first step is to get 4GB  micro SD card and download the latest version of Amstrong distribution image, following this link. Be careful to take the beagleBone Back link as this page reference all the BeagleBone platforms.

• Then, you get a img.xz file to uncompress it on linux, use xz -d img.xz command

• At this point, you can copy the image to the sd card using dd command:

dd if=BBB-eMMC-flasher-2013.05.27.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M
if= is the image file used as source
of= is the target device. use dmesg to ensure you choose the right device.

• Now, wait for about 10 minutes. Then check the result with fdisk

fdisk -l /dev/sdb
Disque /dev/sdb : 3965 Mo, 3965190144 octets
255 têtes, 63 secteurs/piste, 482 cylindres, total 7744512 secteursUnités = secteurs de 1 * 512 = 512 octets
Taille de secteur (logique / physique) : 512 octets / 512 octets
taille d'E/S (minimale / optimale) : 512 octets / 512 octets
Identifiant de disque : 0x00000000
Périphérique Amorce  Début        Fin      Blocs     Id  Système
/dev/sdb1   *          63      144584       72261    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdb2          144585     7132859     3494137+  83  Linux

• Then Eject the SD and plug it in the BBB off.

• Apparently, but it has to be confirmed : you just have to switch BBB on and it automatically starts on the SD card. Nothing apears on the screen, so just wait until the 4 led are on. It seems to be about 45 minutes. You can notice the SD access led (2nd) is blinking. This is not what you have in the documentation, so be careful.

• You can eventually check the update execution process by connecting to the device using ssh then take a look to the processing : like for example with df -h /media/2 command. The target size is about 1GB. After, there are different post installation steps and actually I did not find any log to follow to know the installation process.

The installation process executes /usr/bin/emmc.sh script. You can review it to understand the upgrade process. At the end of it you will see that all the led are set on.