I was fairly excited, when I heard of the BBB.
One thing I absolutely loved, was the fact, that this was a real open alternative to the PI
Open schematics.
Open processor
Open OS (yeah a tie with the PI I know… but I like naming three things, when it comes to listing things)
Unfortunately I also found the documentation to be lacking some vital aspects and infos. 🙁
I am somewhat undecided when it comes to automation or auto-magic.
On the one hand it is of course nice, when things just do work out of the box.
On the other hand it’s not just bad but worse, when things do not work at all.
Which was the case with the BBB.
Everybody else plugged it in and BAM! They were able to connect to the device via SSH.
Not me. But why? The only “driver” the BBB doc supplied was one udev-rule.
That rule mostly just modprobed a module: ftdi_sio
I installed the rule and…. it did not work.
After trying to add the module to the running kernel it told me, that it could not add the module, because it did not find it.
So I looked into my kernel config and it turned out, that I did not build the module at all.
Not to steal even more of you’re time: it did not work after I build the code into the kernel.
Bottom-line: nobody tells you, that you also have to have USB-Tethering enabled.
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Android_USB_Tethering#Kernel_configuration
provides a good page on howto enable USB-Tethering for your kernel.
Sorry for the long post, but I thought I share my disappointed 🙂
EDIT:
As a little addition: The BBB uses a MINI-USB-Cable. That’s M I N I.
Your Android is (most likely) using a Micro-USB-Cable. The mini-USB-Cable is included and comes with the package, but it kind of confused me, that some people wrote this.