This mini tutorial will show you how to connect to the Bone via the serial connection to determine the IP address, test the network connection and DNS. You'll need to know the COM serial port address, see the Drivers tutorial on how to determine the COM and install drivers.

For this tutorial you will need:

• Beagle Bone
• Ethernet Cable

Pick these parts up at the Adafruit shop!

Terminal Software

To connect via the USB cable, you'll need a terminal program. Built into Windows is Hyperterm. You can google around to find another good terminal program.

Connect to the Bone's COM port at 115200 baud, 8 bit, No parity, 1 stop bit, no flow control.

Hit return a few times, to show the login screen.

Log in with the user name root and no password.

That's it you're logged in!

dmesg

Now we can try out the Ethernet connection. Plug a standard straight-through cable from the Bone to your Ethernet router.

Our favorite tool is dmesg - this will tell you all the system messages, such as what hardware was found. Type dmesg and hit return at the root@beaglebone: ~# prompt.

As you can see the last part of boot up is to bring the ethernet connection eth0 up.

Ethernet Test

You can verify the ethernet connection by typing in ifconfig -a

You can see under inet addr: the internet address of the Bone - it uses DHCP to automatically get an IP address and this is what the router gave us back. If you don't see anything, try rebooting the system by typing in reboot and hitting return. Make sure your Ethernet cable is well connected to both the Bone and the router.

Now you can test the outgoing connection. Type in ping 18.70.0.160 and hit return.

If it works, you'll see the above. You can type Control-C to cancel.

Next you can test the DNS system, by pinging www.google.com , which should also succeed.