Booting Galileo from an SD card

Booting your board from an SD card brings you many advantages. Besides allowing you to connect to the Internet from a Wi-Fi connection and have your application memory increased, it makes your Arduino sketches persistent and also allows you the possibility of using more interesting development tools and languages such as Python.

To burn your image, you'll need:

• A FAT32 formatted microSD card. It can be of any size from 1 GB up to 32 GB.
• A computer.
• An SD card adapter (optional).

Let's start by downloading the Clanton image which is available at https://communities.intel.com/community/makers/drivers; click on the SD-Card Linux Image link to start your download.

When the download completes, you'll have to extract its contents.

For extracting the downloaded file in Linux OS, use the following steps:

1. If you don't have bzip2 already installed, you should install it by typing sudo apt-get install bzip2 in your terminal.
2. Extract the file contents using the command bzip2 -cd downloaded_file.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -, where downloaded_file.tar.bz2 is your downloaded file.
3. Find the card mounting point by executing the df -h command and then insert your card in the card reader and execute the same command again. The new entry in the printed list is your SD card mounting point.
4. Copy the contents of the extracted folder by typing cp -r * /media/your_mounting_point, with /media/your_mounting_point being the card mounting point that you've found using the df command.

To extract the downloaded file on Mac, open the downloaded file with your system compress utility and extract the folder contents to the top of the SD card drive.

To extract the downloaded file in Windows, you can use WinRAR to extract the downloaded file contents and use the following steps:

1. Insert your card in the card reader.
2. When the extraction finishes, copy the extracted folder contents and paste them in the top directory of the SD card volume.

Now, you should have your bootable SD card ready and the root of your SD card will now contain the following files:

SD card contents

With your Galileo powered off, insert the SD card in the board. You'll need to wait for some time to have the board ready and booted from the SD card.

Now, let's get the board connected to the Internet, so that we can test whether the Galileo had booted properly.