Intel Galileo and Debian, but back to Yocto Linux

Last updated May 1, 2024 Published Mar 13, 2017

The content here is under the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license

It’s been a while since we have the Intel Galileo board in the market as well as the Intel Galileo Gen2, which is a version with performance improvements. Yocto is the official Linux distribution that Intel has chosen to create a full environment where makers can build awesome IoT projects. Unfortunately, Yocto does not have an easy learning curve, most of the packages are not up to date and the software repositories offered are restricted.

the community has developed other ways to get a Linux distribution running, such as Debian and Ubuntu. Both are used worldwide and are easy to get started. I struggled to find the correct version to be used in the Galileo Gen2 and I feel that others will too, for this reason, I’ve written a post on how to use a Debian distribution with Intel Galileo Gen2.

Getting the image

The first result when searching for the term “Galileo and Debian” is a sourceforge link to download the image and a few references to read about assembling the image and expanding the SD Card size.

Grab the latest link from the image list, and download the image called galileo.img_v.1.0.0.7z, in case of not found or has an error I’ve uploaded my image on Google Drive.

Use the credential “user” and the password “user”

The next step will be to create a bootable SD Card within the Debian image, as Intel provides us with a good tutorial to achieve this I’m not going to focus on installing the image. Visit this link for instructions on how to set up the image.

Issues found while using Debian on Intel Galileo

Issue 1 (unsolved)

The first big issue was to get the SSH running since the error message “[ 88.235310] sshd[2303]: segfault at b7118c7d ip b70f3539 sp bfd9ac90 error ffff0006 in libpthread-2.19.so[b70ed000+17000]” was shown every time a SSH connection was made. The first approach was to remove the openssh-server and reinstall it, but the error persists.

Issue 2 (solved)

The ethernet interface is not up by default, each time that the system reboots the interface eth0 is down. The easiest way to fix this issue was to execute the following commands in the shell(as root)

ifconfig eth0 up && dhclient eth0

To automate the initialization a script has been placed at /etc/rc.local with the same statements.

EDIT: April 5, 2017

I changed the approach, so now I’m trying to have node-red working on the Intel Galileo. The first challenge is to update the node version to at least 4.*.

EDIT: April 16, 2017

As a final word, I gave up on the Galileo Debian image, I decided to step back and try again the Yocto image. There are many issues to work when using Debian such as the MRAA library, SSH and even the network sometimes doesn’t work.