Debian on BeagleBoard classic.

I have one of the original beagleboards with the omap3 processor, which is ARM+DSP coprocessor. Originally it used the Angstrom Linux distribution, which uses bitbake to build the kernel and all related software tools. I saw recently that Debian is now supported on this device; I like to run Debian on everything including my PC's, BeagleBone Black, and Raspberry Pi (raspbian - almost Debian), so why not on the beagleboard as well?
My hardware setup is a USB-serial adapter from a Linux (Debian, of course) host to the serial port of the Beagleboard. I also have a Sabrent USB-Ethernet adapter on the Beagleboard.
The "official" instructions seem to be at elinux.org/BeagleBoardDebian, which I found from beagleboard.org/project/debian. Per those instructions, I downloaded the netinstall package from github.com/RobertCNelson/netinstall (using git of course), and put it on a 16GB SD card using the command:

sudo ./mk_mmc.sh --mmc $SDCARD --dtb omap3-beagle --distro wheezy-armhf --firmware --serial-mode

On my PC I have SDCARD=/dev/sdb, because that's where the memory card shows up when it's plugged in. MAKE SURE you get this right, because you could wipe out a disk on the PC if you get it wrong. I decided to uses the --serial-mode option to work from the serial port and avoid any HDMI display issues.
Moved the SD card from the PC to Beagleboard, powered up, and got a typical Debian install menu on the serial port! I used

minicom -D /dev/usb/prolific2303 -b 115200 -o

to connect to the USB-serial port. The Beagleboard serial port does not use the modem control lines, so had to turn off the "Hardware Flow Control" and "Modem has DCD" options in minicom.
The netinstall process was just like installing Debian on a PC: select some options and wait for it to download a bunch of packages. It found the Sabrent ethernet and used it with no problem; device usb0 shows up as a network device as well, so it should be possible to install by using a USB connection to the PC host, but I didn't try that.
Finished the install, rebooted the Beagleboard, aaaannnd - nothing happened!!! Load process just stopped in uboot. After a few hours of screaming, hair-pulling, and spelunking in uboot macros, I found the problem:
I had set up /boot as a separate partition.
The uboot macros look for  /boot/uEnv.txt on each partition and then boot Linux using that partition as the root partition. Made /boot a normal directory instead of a mount point, patched up /etc/fstab, and uboot brought up Debian with no problem.
Did my usual Debian tweaks (sensicomm.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-debian-tweaks.html) and everything seems to be working as expected.

ARM presentation at Consultants Network of NH

On February 6 I made a presentation to the IEEE Consultants Network of New Hampshire (www.consultantsnh.org) entitled "Beagles and Berries: the World of Low-Cost ARM Computing," about the history of the ARM architecture and describing and demonstrating the Texas Instruments Beagleboard (www.beagleboard.org) and the Raspberry PI (www.raspberrypi.org).
My slides are available for download at https://sites.google.com/site/sensicommllc/Home .

Desampling using a Cascaded Integrator Comb filter

Been working with a BeagleBoard for the last few months. Can't say much about the project but the Beagle is a nice ARM Linux platform. Finishing up, so now I have more time to update the MHZ100Q sourceforge project page.
I've now added a page describing the ideas behind the Cascaded Integrator-Comb (CIC) filter, and why it makes such a nice desampling filter for a high-rate data acquisition system. Input is 100MHz at 8 bits, and the output is any integer submultiple down to about 1kHz. The hardware resources in the FPGA are low: a set of 64-bit adders and registers, along with a reasonable amount of control logic.
The first version of the page is general description and overview. I plan to put more details of the math behind the CIC. In researching math and html, I found asciimathml.js . It's an open source JavaScript package that lets one embed equations into a webpage's text using simple LaTeX-like strings. I've used it internally and it's really nice to use. Should be live on the mhz100q page in the near future.