I recently got a Beaglebone Black.   I was very excited; it's similar to a Pi, but has 60 GPIO ports!

Getting a serial console up on it was not quite a simple as I thought, since the BeagleBone uses FTDI.  Following the instructions here I installed the OS X serial driver for FTDI.   After plugging in the device, I had this new serial device:

/dev/tty.usbmodemfa133

So to get a serial console up I typed:

screen /dev/tty.usbmodemfa133 115200

Once I had the Beaglebone started and had a network connection, the next step was to update the package manager.  If you're interested, the default OS on the Beaglebone is Angstrom Linux, and the package system is Itsy.  You can view the available packages here.

opkg update
opkg upgrade

Since I had a USB Wifi Adapter, it seemed to make sense to use it.  My adapter is an PCUSBW1150.

opkg list 'linux-firmware-rt*'opkg install linux-firmware-rtl8192cu

After a reboot, I now have a wlan0 device:

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:02:72:C3:AB:72
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

Angstrom uses connman to manage network settings.  My connman configuration for my wifi is in the file '/var/lib/connman/wifi.config' and looks like:

[service_home]
Type=wifi
Name=shrek2.5
Security=wpa
Passphrase=passpasspass

Once connman is configured, restart it

systemctl restart connman.service

Finally, some additional configuration. I installed nano

opkg install nano

To change the hostname, edit the file '/etc/hostname'