I was able to pretty easily get USB networking on the beagleboard, going between my Mac and the beagleboard without a USB to Ethernet adapter (of which I have ordered one, but two weeks on, DealExtreme hasn’t done much with my order yet. Other than charge my PayPal account that is…)

Anyway, here’s what needed to be done. First up, the Ethernet interface, if you’re using the USB OTG port is usb0. If you know what you’re doing, that will probably be enough information to get you up and running.

If you want a how-to, read on.
On the beagleboard, when you’re logged in via the serial console, you need to edit the network interfaces file:

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

In this file, will be a couple of lines like so:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

This is for the loopback interface, 127.0.0.1, we want to add a new interface to the file, I wanted it with a static IP as it’s easier for me to get the Mac configured to talk to it correctly that way. Below the two lines in the file, add the following (changing IP addresses to suit your environment)

auto usb0
iface usb0 inet static
address 10.0.2.12
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.2.1

Save the file, and restart the network subsystem;

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart


This will bring up the usb0 network interface.

Next, on the Mac, my machine wasn’t seeing the USB interface as VMware had grabbed it. As soon as I released it from VMware, my Mac saw two new interfaces, which I went into System Preferences to configure.
One interface was called the CDC Composite Gadget, the other was simply Ethernet Adapter (en12). I’ve got no idea what the CDC thing is, a quick google search doesn’t tell me much. The one I am interested in is the Ethernet Adapter (en12) – I configured this with a static IP as well – 10.0.2.1/24 and suddenly I had host-to-host networking up and running. As an aside, you can enter the IP Address in System Preferences as “10.0.2.1/24” and it will fill in the correct subnet mask, and guess at the router as nnn.nnn.nnn.1.

Now I need to get sshd running on the beagle.