Book Image

BeagleBone Black Cookbook

Book Image

BeagleBone Black Cookbook

Overview of this book

There are many single-board controllers and computers such as Arduino, Udoo, or Raspberry Pi, which can be used to create electronic prototypes on circuit boards. However, when it comes to creating more advanced projects, BeagleBone Black provides a sophisticated alternative. Mastering the BeagleBone Black enables you to combine it with sensors and LEDs, add buttons, and marry it to a variety of add-on boards. You can transform this tiny device into the brain for an embedded application or an endless variety of electronic inventions and prototypes. With dozens of how-tos, this book kicks off with the basic steps for setting up and running the BeagleBone Black for the first time, from connecting the necessary hardware and using the command line with Linux commands to installing new software and controlling your system remotely. Following these recipes, more advanced examples take you through scripting, debugging, and working with software source files, eventually working with the Linux kernel. Subsequently, you will learn how to exploit the board's real-time functions. We will then discover exciting methods for using sound and video with the system before marching forward into an exploration of recipes for building Internet of Things projects. Finally, the book finishes with a dramatic arc upward into outer space, when you explore ways to build projects for tracking and monitoring satellites.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
BeagleBone Black Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

systemd services


First, it wasn't a typo to label this section as systemd in all lowercase letters. It is one of the mandates of Linux that any daemon, which is what systemd is, should be in lowercase. Also, daemons must also come with the lowercase suffix: d.

So what is systemd exactly? Briefly, it is a background process and a system management daemon for managing user space system services. Systemd will become standard plumbing for most major Linux distros and is an integral part of the BBB Debian distribution. It is the first process initiated on bootup in the Linux user space and the last process to terminate on shutdown. Basically, systemd starts the show on your Linux OS and turns out the lights as it's leaving.

Sound familiar? If it does, that's because systemd is the heir to init: Linux's longtime daemon of daemons.

Mastering systemd on your BBB helps us better understand system dependencies because systemd serves as a robust framework for these dependencies. Here are a couple of examples...