I’ve been playing around with my BeagleBone (BB) lately and it’s felt a bit, incomplete. It’s not because it has a faster and cheaper brother out there now either (BeagleBone Black (BBB)). It’s because it didn’t have Emacs installed! 🙂

Unfortunately, Emacs is not even in the Angstrom package browser. I did find a post which claimed at one point it was listed, but alas, no more. So, to the source we go.

Download the source: emacs-24.3.tar.gz Extract. Don’t remember your tar commands? Hopefully you don’t end up in this situation then (xkcd ftw): Configure: I don’t think you’ll need fancy graphics on your BB, so do a: ./configure –with-xpm=no –with-gif=no Build it: type make . Ok, this will take a long time if you compile on your BB (over an hour). I’m trying to get my cross compile environment set up with Ubunutu running in Virtual Box, on my mac, but I’m still working through things. Open Embedded seems very powerful, but it seems like walking into a grocery store (in the U.S). I just want regular milk, not organic, not organic grass-fed, not organic, grass-fed, from Betsy, etc… Install. You’ll need root to do this and in the default Angstrom distro, you have to su and then do make install . I’ve installed the sudo package ( opkg install sudo ) and added my user account to the sudoers file (with visudo ).

So, why would you want to do this? Well, the only vim command I know is :q! … Honestly, accessing the board from Emacs on the host, using tramp-mode over ssh is probably better. But I’d thought it’d be fun 🙂

Anyway, my Chromebook died, so I can no longer run Emacs on that. All I’m missing is a keyboard and video display and I basically have a Chromebook 🙂