Giving Internet access to the BeagleBone board via the Ethernet is very simple. All you need to do is connect one end of Ethernet cable to the BeagleBone board, and the other end to a router with an Internet connection. The BeagleBone board will obtain the IP address dynamically from the router using DHCP and get Internet access. To check this you can just type in the following command:

ping www.google.com

You will get the response as shown in the following screenshot. This means you have a working Internet connection.

Actually, what the ping command does is, it tests the connection and latency between two network connections. The ping command sends packets of data to the other network computer, in our case the www.google.com server, or the IP address of that server. You can see next to www.google.com in the output above, the global IP address of the server is shown. The picture shows how the ping command measures the time taken to get a response...