Warning LONG post, for big thanks..,
Folks: I want to thank everyone for their assistance. I can report SUCCESS!.
Now what I did to get it to work.
The instructions at
http://www.elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbu...nfigured_Image
but specifically via:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/OMAP
Precise Pangolin (12.04)
Images can be downloaded at
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/12.04/release/
Preinstalled desktop image
The preinstalled-desktop image allows you to unpack a preinstalled version of Ubuntu onto a target device.
There are three images available, each for a different type of computer:
Texas Instruments OMAP3 (Hard-Float) preinstalled desktop image
For OMAP3 boards. See ARM/OMAP for detailed installation information.
I was able to write the image both from my MacOS machine, but also successfully via a Ubuntu machine.
However, after creating the SD card, the symptom of not being able to see the video on my hdmi tv output remained. It was then I looked at the uEnv.txt file on the supplied demo image that came shipped with the beagleboard xm itself and saw dvimode="hd720 instead of what the file on the newly created sdcard had. It had some other resolution that obviously my tv just could not display. So, I changed it to the simple hd720 phrase and voila text now appeared on the hdmi monitor.
I also by the way did create a sdcard using the sakoman.com makecard.sh method. This ofcourse required the use of a host ubuntu machine to run the script and I must say I was very impressed with it as well. It however also did not set the dvimode correctly for me, so I also changed the dvi setting in the environment file (or copied it in if it did not exist, ( I can't remember now..) but after I did that it too worked. After about 45 minutes I watched the system complete its self configuration and boot into gnome window manager.
However I did not keep the sakoman created sdcard as my goal was to run ubuntu on the beagleboard, and not angstrom based distro that the sakomon method creates.
In short, many thanks. I have since installed a vnc server on the machine and a lightweight desktop window manager lxde as recommended in the instructions.
Yours,
Michael