Linux Host

This section show how to install a new operating system to your Bubblegum-96 using the fastboot method on a Linux host computer.

1) Enter U-Boot Shell

The following steps assumes that the board is flashed with proper bootloaders.

  • Make sure bubblegum-96 board is in power off mode
  • Plug in the UART debug board and connect serial console to the host PC
    • Open a Serial Terminal like Minicom
    • Set baud rate as 115200
    • Set (8N1) – [8bit data, No-parity, & 1 stop bit]
  • Connect the host PC with Bubblegum-96 USB3.0 port via type USB A-A cable
    • USB3.0 port on Bubblegum96 board is the blue port
    • This cable won’t provide Power, so it will not boot up the board
  • Plug in power to the Bubblegum96 board

Open serial terminal and press Enter while U-Boot starts to enter the U-Boot shell with owl> prompt.

Note: If your board is not booting into U-Boot, then you may need to recover your board by following the Recovery Guide.

2) Download required images

Download the boot and root file system images from the Download page.

Once you have downloaded the appropriate files, continue to next step.

3) Enter Fastboot mode

Note: The Fastboot mode is used to flash the images to on-board eMMC of the Bubblegum-96 board.

Once you can access the U-Boot shell, execute run create_gpt command to reconstruct the gpt table and it will show

Writing GPT: success!. at the serial terminal.

Execute fastboot usb command to access fastboot mode. If the board is in fastboot-mode, you will see a device ID 18d1:0c02 by entering the command lsusb on host PC.

Now, proceed to the following sections to flash images to eMMC.

4) Flash kernel image

The kernel image of 96board is contained in boot.emmc.img file.

Please make sure you have already installed fastboot tool on your PC, if not, run the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install android-tools-fastboot

After that, continue flashing Bubblegum-96.

$ sudo fastboot flash BOOT boot.emmc.img

Note: boot.emmc.img is a vfat format image, it contains kernel image, initramfs image, device tree blob, logo image used by u-boot

5) Flash the root file system (rootfs)

The rootfs image of 96board is named as bubblegum-jessie_alip_*.emmc.img

$ sudo fastboot flash SYSTEM bubblegum-jessie_alip_*.emmc.img

This step takes around 2 minutes or more depend on the image size.

6) Create bootloader.img and Flash using fastboot

We need to flash the bootloader onto eMMC by fastboot. First we need to create the bootloader.img image.

Use the following commands on Host pc to create the bootloader.img:

# Creates a 6MiB empty image.
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=bootloader.img bs=1M count=6
# Place bootloader.bin to correct place.
$ dd conv=notrunc if=bootloader.bin of=bootloader.img seek=4063 bs=512
# Place u-boot-dtb.img to correct place.
$ dd conv=notrunc if=u-boot-dtb.img of=bootloader.img seek=6110 bs=512

After preparing the bootloader.img image, use fastboot to flash BOOTLOADER partition.

$ sudo fastboot flash BOOTLOADER bootloader.img

Once all of the above mentioned processes are completed successfully, reboot the Bubblegum-96 board to boot the installed images!