Writing SD Cards: Linux

Every Linux distro should include dd. Run which dd to confirm you have it installed.

Finding the SD card descriptor:

1. Insert the SD card
2. In a terminal run fdisk -l. Depending on your system, you may need to run this as root (sudo fdisk -l). Look for the SD card in the list of disks. On an Ubuntu 12.04 system with one hard drive, the output is:
3. In this example, the SD card device descriptor is /dev/disk1. The actual descriptor will differ on other machines with different disk configurations, but should take the form /dev/diskX.

Copying the .bin file:

1. Unmount (not eject) the drive using this command (replacing X with your actual SD descriptor):

   diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX
   

2. Run this command, replacing the last three arguments with the correct values:

   dd bs=512 seek=<N> if=<yourFile.bin> of=</dev/diskX>
   

   1. <N>: depends on the target slot number; use (131072 + slotNum*32768). More details here.
   2. <yourFile.bin>: the binary FPGA configuration file
   3. </dev/diskX>: device descriptor for the SD card
3. If successful, dd should report the following (the time/throughput values will differ):

   18032+1 records in
   18032+1 records out
   9232444 bytes transferred in 8.503631 secs (1085706 bytes/sec)
   

4. Repeat for additional .bin config files in additional slots if needed.
5. Eject the SD card in the Finder (if it's mounted).