TS-4900 Jessie Getting started
From embeddedTS Manuals
Debian is preferred for applications that require updates for many years as well as a large set of binary packages that can be installed with "apt-get". Once installed the default user is "root" with no password.
To write this to an SD card, first partition the SD card to have one large ext4 partition. See the guide here for more information. Once it is formatted, extract this tar with:
# Assuming your SD card is /dev/sdc with one partition
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdc1
mkdir /mnt/sd/
sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/sd/
sudo tar xjf debian-armhf-jessie-latest.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/sd
sudo umount /mnt/sd
sync
To rewrite the eMMC, boot to the SD card. You cannot rewrite the emmc while it is mounted elsewhere, or used to currently boot the system. Once booted to the SD, run:
mkfs.ext4 /dev/mmcblk2p1
mkdir /mnt/emmc
mount /dev/mmcblk2p1 /mnt/emmc
wget -qO- ftp://ftp.embeddedarm.com/ts-socket-macrocontrollers/ts-4900-linux/distributions/debian/debian-armhf-jessie-latest.tar.bz2 | tar xj -C /mnt/emmc/
umount /mnt/emmc
sync
The same commands can be used to write SATA by substituting /dev/mmcblk2p1 with /dev/sda1.