As a basic example, you can run a ROS core on one terminal on the BeagleBone Black:

$ roscore

And from another terminal publish a pose message (note you can press Tab Tab after geometry_msgs/Pose and it'd autocomplete the message fields, that then you need to change since it'd have the default values):

$ rostopic pub /dummy geometry_msgs/Pose
Position:
x: 1.0
y: 2.0
z: 3.0
Orientation:
x: 0.0
y: 0.0
z: 0.0
w: 1.0 -r 10

Now, from your laptop (in the same network), you can set ROS_MASTER_URI to point to the BeagleBone Black (IP 192.168.1.6 in our case):

$ export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://192.168.1.6:11311

And now you should be able to see the pose published from the BeagleBone Black on your laptop doing:

$ rostopic echo -n1 /dummy
Position:
x: 1.0
y: 2.0
z: 3.0
Orientation:
x: 0.0
y: 0.0
z: 0.0
w: 1.0
---

If you use a PoseStamped, you can even visualize it on rviz.

From this point, you can check multiple projects at http://wiki.ros.org/BeagleBone, as well as another installation option, which uses the Angstrom OS instead of Ubuntu, but it does not support ROS Kinetic at the moment.