In order to install Linux on the BeagleBone Black, an image of the operating system and a SD Card is needed. The operating system image will be flashed on the SD card. Flashing will be performed using your computer or laptop, normally a Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X or Linux computer equipped with a SD card reader.
Afterwards the SD card will be plugged into the BeagleBone Black and Linux will be booted from the SD card.
First, download an image to your computer. In this class we will use the Debian Buster IoT1) Image (bone-debian-10.3-iot-armhf-2020-04-06-4gb.img).
This image contains:
Download the image bone-debian-10.3-iot-armhf-2020-04-06-4gb.img.xz from the beagleboard.org website.
If you like newer or other images, you can find them here.
In most cases, the image-file is compressed in an archive, indicated by the .xz suffix at the end of the file name (e.g. bone-debian-10.3-iot-armhf-2020-04-06-4gb.img.xz).
In the past the process of decompressing an burning the image was a very complex task. First you had to decompress the image with an appropriate compression tool, next the SD card needed some portions with appropriate parameters. These partitions had to be formatted. And then the image could be flashed. The tools for this process are dependent on the used operation system.
Today the process is done by a single tool, called balenaEtcher. First, download belenaEtcher from https://www.balena.io/etcher/, install and open ist. belenaEtcher is available for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
After starting balenaEtcher for following window opens up, similar like this: