Step-by-step Ubuntu SD Card Setup

Step-by-step Ubuntu SD-Card setup

These instructions are for a Linux user

You will need an 8GB micro SD card and a card reader/writer.

Warning: do not use these instructions verbatim. You need to adjust them for your drive layout -- you could wipe your hard drive if you are not careful enough.

Plug in the SD card and then make sure it is not mounted

# Make double sure you know the drive designator used for the SD card.  One way to do it is like this:
dmesg | tail -n 10 
[3741938.562849] sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page present
[3741938.562852] sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
# Now we know sdc represents the new SD card, so umount it.  
sudo umount /dev/sdc1
# There may be more than one partition to umount, so check then mounts:
mount | grep sdc
# In this case there are no more instances of /dev/sdc*, so we are done with this step

Expand the SD card image

# check the md5sum against the expected one.  The md5sum value is usually posted separately.
# It could be in a forum, on a website or contained in a separate file.  The cd12a526ecdb34c12b4a737044e867e7
# value is the checksum that verifies the file transferred correctly.
md5sum odroidu2_20130104-linaro-ubuntu-desktop-uSDeMMC.img.xz
# cd12a526ecdb34c12b4a737044e867e7  odroidu2_20130104-linaro-ubuntu-desktop-uSDeMMC.img.xz
# extract the xz file
xz -d odroidu2_20130104-linaro-ubuntu-desktop-uSDeMMC.img.xz 
# check the results
ls
# odroidu2_20130104-linaro-ubuntu-desktop-uSDeMMC.img is the extracted file.

Write the image file to the SD card

# Use disk duplicate to write the image to the SD card.
# Make sure you know the drive designator and check for typos.  This step can humble
# even an experienced person.  I speak from experience...
# note that the drive designator does not have a number -- we are writing the whole device contents
# and it contains more just two partitions.  It has the bootloader, u-boot binary, u-boot environment
# and some proprietary code required to boot the Exynos processor
sudo dd if=odroidu2_20130104-linaro-ubuntu-desktop-uSDeMMC.img of=/dev/sdc bs=4M
# This takes at least a few minutes.  This image took about six minutes to write using my hardware.
# Make sure all the data is flushed
sync

Now you can removed the SD card, insert it into the odroid-u2 and boot it. Just plug in the power supply