BeagleBone Black – configure NTP client

The BeagleBone black do not have Real Time Clock and as a consequence each time you reboot, you’re back at time 0. To get it updated to the local hour, you can configure NTP client (if connected to network) using the following commands:

root@beaglebone:~# opkg update
root@beaglebone:~# opkg install ntp ntpdate
root@beaglebone:~# mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.old
root@beaglebone:~# ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Paris /etc/localtime
root@beaglebone:~# killall -KILL ntpd
root@beaglebone:~# ntpdate pool.ntp.org
root@beaglebone:~# /etc/init.d/ntpd start
root@beaglebone:~# date
Sun Jun  2 17:41:10 CEST 2013

BeagleBone Black – General Overview

I just got my BeagleBone black device, this is really looking like a Raspberry PI, but personally I found multiple advantage for this card compare to RPI, the first one is related to the embedded 2GB of flash memory that do not require to add external storage. Thank to that, for the first start, you just need to connect the device to your network and a screen and it run ! After about 30s you are connected to a graphical interface and able to surf the web.

The first issue I got with this device is the micro-hdmi connector located really close to the USB connector, due to the current use of an micro-hdmi 2 hdmi adaptor, i’m not able to connect correctly a USB device.I highly recommend to use a micro-hdmi cable instead of a monoblock micro-hdmi to hdmi adaptor for this reason.

By the way, the device is accessible using ssh (root/rootme) and display can be exported easily.

The next part of the article will be about different comparison between BeagleBone and other systems like Raspberry Pi.

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