Downloading a Disk Image

There are many different operating systems available for the Tinker Board from the community and open source software projects. The first operating system that we’re going to use for the Tinker Board, though, will come directly from ASUS. Specifically, we’ll install TinkerOS, the Debian Linux distribution for the Tinker Board, and TinkerOS Android, an Android OS that will look familiar if you have an Android tablet or smart phone.

To download the ASUS operating systems, we’ll go the ASUS web site for the Tinker Board,³ as shown in Figure 3-2.

Here you’ll click the Support tab at the top of the page. Once you reach the Support page, click the Driver and Tools tab. As shown in Figure 3-3, this will bring you to a page that says “Please select OS,” with a drop-down menu. On the menu, select Others.

The most recent downloadable release for the Tinker Board from ASUS will appear at the top of the page. But if you click See All Downloads, you’ll be able to see all of the releases, past and present, for the Android and TinkerOS distributions, as well as any additional software utilities or resources; such as schematics and CAD drawings of the boards.

You will always want to download the most recent non-beta release for the OS that you want to use. Of course, more experienced users may want to experiment with beta releases to test certain features.

When you’ve decided on an OS, click the Download button to the right of the title. A zipped folder will begin downloading. Inside the folder is an .img file, which is the packaged disk image file that contains what will eventually become your OS for the Tinker Board. To access this file, you’ll need to unzip the folder after the download finishes using your preferred utility and method.

Writing an OS to Your Drive

The compressed disk image file can’t be copied directly onto your storage media, though, because it can’t be read by the Tinker Board in this format. It needs special software to write it to your drive so that it can be recognized and used by the Tinker Board.

To do this, we’ll use Etcher . There are many different pieces of software that can accomplish this task, but Etcher has a lot going for it. It’s open source, easy to use, and available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. You’ll download and install it from its web site.⁴

Again, Etcher is incredibly simple to use; the process has only three steps. The first is to select the .img file that you just downloaded and unzipped. Click the Select Image button as shown in Figure 3-4, navigate to the unzipped folder with the .img file, and click to load it into Etcher.

The next step is to select the drive that you want to use with your Tinker Board. This will be the SD card that you just formatted or other bootable media that has been prepped, such as the Tinker Board S itself to utilize the eMMC module.

When you select your drive, the label that you gave it during the formatting process may not show-up in Etcher . This is OK; just be sure to verify that it’s the correct drive by identifying the drive letter. When you’re sure that you’ve selected the correct disk image file and the correct drive, click “Flash!” and it will write the disk image onto the drive that you selected.

Note

This process erases everything that is on the selected drive; that is why it’s very important to verify that you’ve selected the correct one. The fact that it erases the drive does not eliminate the need to properly format the drive, with the exception of eMMC, before this process.

Once the flashing process begins, Etcher will give you some information while it writes the image to your drive, as shown in Figure 3-5. It tells you the percentage complete, the estimated time left, and how quickly the drive is writing the data. The speed of your drive will depend on your computer’s overall speed, how the drive is connected to your computer, and the actual speed that your drive is rated for.

When Etcher finishes, it will let you know that it is complete and ask if you want to flash the image again to another drive. If you don’t need to do that, then you can exit Etcher and we can move on to booting the Tinker Board with your drive.

Note

Etcher’s default setting is to eject the drive once the flashing process completes, so don’t panic if you don’t see your media after it finishes.

The Terminal

First, we’re going to power-on the Tinker Board to boot into TinkerOS with the SD card or eMMC. You should find yourself in the desktop environment. Navigate to the terminal and open a new window. At this time, you should plug your freshly formatted and blank USB storage device into one of the USB ports.

Now that your USB device is plugged in, we need to see what disk name TinkerOS has given the USB device. To do this, we’re going to enter sudo fdisk -l into the terminal. This lists all of the drives currently connected to the Tinker Board, as shown in Figure 3-6. More than likely, unless you have multiple drives connected to your Tinker Board, your USB device will show-up as sda1, and for this walkthrough we’re going to assume that is the case. This will be important for the next steps. Also note that the SD card’s root partition shows up as mmcblk0p2.

This duplicates the root partition only, so that the root and file system configuration that was set up on the first boot with the SD card is now also present on the USB device along with the entire file system. This process can take a while, and it may appear that your terminal has frozen, but it’s best to be patient and wait for the process to finish.

After the installation completes, it’s ready to use for the final, and most important, two steps in setting up the USB storage. We’re going to be editing two text files that are used by TinkerOS to determine the boot device so that it knows to boot from the USB device.

The first file is extlinux.conf. To enter the text editor for this file, type sudo nano /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf into the terminal. Once you’re in the file, you’ll need to add a piece of text to its last line. Type root=/dev/sda1 between plymouth.ignore-serial-consoles and console=tty1 as shown in Figure 3-7. This targets the USB device as the root location. Save your changes by pressing Ctrl+X and saving before exiting. This will bring you back to the terminal. To verify that your changes were saved, you can type sudo nano /boot/ext/extlinux.conf into the terminal again to look at the file.

The last file to edit is the fstab file . fstab is a configuration file that automatically mounts partitions. It also defines how the partitions are mounted. This is where we’ll tell TinkerOS to mount the USB device as a boot drive. To do this, enter sudo nano /etc/fstab into the terminal to access the file through the text editor.

Once inside the file, you’ll notice that there are very long strings of letters and numbers that have storage information to their right, such as boot designation and partition numbers. These are the SD card (or eMMC) and USB device’s UUID numbers. UUID numbers are unique numbers assigned by the Linux operating system to identify removable devices. We can use the terminal to see exactly which UUID number corresponds to each drive so that we don’t get confused.

This will list the drives with the more familiar labels that we’ve been referencing plus their UUID numbers. Now if we reference the fstab file at the same time, it makes a lot more sense as shown in Figure 3-8.

Turning our attention back to fstab, locate your SD Card’s UUID number. Notice that /boot is typed to its right. Delete boot, leaving the /. You can also comment out this line using #. Next, find your USB device’s UUID number and note that a / is also located to its right with no text. Type boot next to the / as shown in Figure 3-8. Save the file and return to the terminal.

With that, all of the steps have been completed to boot from the USB device, but we should test things out first. In the terminal type sudo reboot to reboot the system. Do not remove either the SD card or the USB device. If you boot into the desktop environment successfully after the reboot, then things are looking good.

To check to see if TinkerOS is truly running from the USB device, navigate to the File Manager window and look at the free space in the bottom-right corner, as shown in Figure 3-9. If it shows the storage size of your USB device, then everything is truly set up and running properly.