THIS STEP IS IF YOU DON'T HAVE A WORKING GUI, IGNORE FOR NOW
By this point you should have a working serial terminal open to the board. You will use this serial connection to install OpenSSH, and then you can SSH into the board over Ethernet for all future steps.
First, we need to fix some issues with our console. Once the board has booted and you see the prompt root@linaro-gnome:~#, you will notice that you can't see what you're typing in at the prompt. To fix this, type exit and hit enter. This will log you out and back in again, which fixes this issue.
Next, there are random kernel messages printing to the console. To fix this, run dmesg -n 1. This stops all kernel messages except panic messages from printing to the console.
At the command prompt (root@linaro-gnome:#), run
apt-get install openssh-server
Once OpenSSH has installed, run ifconfig and make note of your IP address.
You will be SSH-ing into the linaro user (not root) so add linaro to the sudoers list:
adduser linaro sudo
From a new terminal window on your computer, run:
ssh -X linaro@<ip_address_of_board>
The default password is linaro. There is no need to change this, but you can if you want to.
This opens a new SSH connection to the board with X-forwarding enabled. You're connecting to the board over Ethernet, so feel free to disconnect your USB-to-Serial cable from the serial header on the board.