Once USB Networking has been configured on the BeagleBoard, everything becomes a lot easier.

As ARM is now a first-class citizen for Ubuntu builds, there’s now a world of Ubuntu and Debian software that can easily be installed, either with aptitude or good ol’ apt-get.

After USB networking was up and running, I configured internet connection sharing on my Mac to share out Ethernet 1 to the USB Ethernet Adapter, configured DHCP and restarted networking on the beagle.

From there it was a simple as

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Then, ifconfig usb0 to find out it’s IP address and you can ssh in from the Mac.

Now, I can try out a desktop environment using X11 forwarding with ssh.