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Angstrom

Former Member

Interesting discussion over on the beagleboard google group https://groups.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/beagleboard/kz3M-It3U5Y

 

Reading between the lines, you get the impression that angstrom was a one man show and that the CircuitCo employee who was that one man has now left for another company.

Exactly what that means for any boards currently using angstrom is as yet unclear.

 

However, if true that angstrom was effectively one person it may explain a lot of the issues people here have seen with it.  Unfortunately the risk is that if angstrom ends up effectively unmaintained, any boards using it as the default pre-installed distro could well get stuck in a dead-end.

 

The beagleboard folks have so far steadfastly stuck with angstrom in spite of the obvious problems, I think it'll be interesting to see what happens next.

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  • selsinork wrote:

     

    Reading between the lines, you get the impression that angstrom was a one man show and that the CircuitCo employee who was that one man has now left for another company.

     

    You're being over-generous.  Angstrom was always  a one man no-show, because that one person (alleged maintainer) never actually did any maintenance AFAICS.  The same bugs that affected the first BeagleBone were still present when BeagleBone Black came out.  In fact he made a point of non-maintenance on principle -- the front page of the website more or less declared that all problems are for yourself to resolve.  Proactive porting of packages also seems to have been avoided, so instead of focusing on useful work, under Angstrom one is constantly yak shaving instead.

     

    If he's now left CircuitCo, it won't make the slightest bit of difference to Angstrom since it wasn't maintained anyway.

     

    Maybe the change will act as a catalyst though for Jason Kridner to pick another distro for BeagleBoard --- hopefully a distro that already has a team of maintainers and a bug tracker.

     

    Morgaine.

  • in reply to morgaine

    Morgaine Dinova wrote:

     

    Maybe the change will act as a catalyst though for Jason Kridner to pick another distro for BeagleBoard --- hopefully a distro that already has a team of maintainers and a bug tracker.

    I'm sure Jason would be happy to have someone "step up to the plate" and provide and maintain another distro for Beagles.  Unfortunately, this is a common problem with FLOSS.  People write and maintain FLOSS for a number of reasons, but the reason is rarely that "wow, I just love maintaining distros and I'm happy to do it for free".  I don't know Koen Kooi personally, but he did "step up to the plate" back when BeagleBoard was new.  The first version of Ångström I used was a "Demo" version back in August 2008.  It was pretty amazing seeing GNU/Linux blasting away on that little board with 128MB of RAM, and it's always worked find for my applications which are all user-space with standard devices.  I don't know what incentives -- if any -- Koen was given to bring Ångström up to first-rate quality other than "pride of workmanship", and I don't know what other demands there were on his time.  I think he was a grad student back in 2008 -- maybe he was happy to work on something that allowed him to procrastinate on writing his thesis?  I have no idea.

     

    Time for a joke:  Q: How many graduate students does it take to change a light bulb?  A: One, but it takes him nine years.

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  • in reply to morgaine

    Morgaine Dinova wrote:

     

    Maybe the change will act as a catalyst though for Jason Kridner to pick another distro for BeagleBoard --- hopefully a distro that already has a team of maintainers and a bug tracker.

    I'm sure Jason would be happy to have someone "step up to the plate" and provide and maintain another distro for Beagles.  Unfortunately, this is a common problem with FLOSS.  People write and maintain FLOSS for a number of reasons, but the reason is rarely that "wow, I just love maintaining distros and I'm happy to do it for free".  I don't know Koen Kooi personally, but he did "step up to the plate" back when BeagleBoard was new.  The first version of Ångström I used was a "Demo" version back in August 2008.  It was pretty amazing seeing GNU/Linux blasting away on that little board with 128MB of RAM, and it's always worked find for my applications which are all user-space with standard devices.  I don't know what incentives -- if any -- Koen was given to bring Ångström up to first-rate quality other than "pride of workmanship", and I don't know what other demands there were on his time.  I think he was a grad student back in 2008 -- maybe he was happy to work on something that allowed him to procrastinate on writing his thesis?  I have no idea.

     

    Time for a joke:  Q: How many graduate students does it take to change a light bulb?  A: One, but it takes him nine years.

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  • in reply to johnbeetem

    John Beetem wrote:

     

    I'm sure Jason would be happy to have someone "step up to the plate" and provide and maintain another distro for Beagles.

     

    A "distro for Beagles" is not required!!!!  The temptation to link the obligatory XKCD strip is strong, but I won't because it's no joking matter --- we have quite enough well supported distros already, and each additional one just dilutes the FOSS manpower and produces yet another documentation and support problem.  There are a few good reasons for making new distros (such as evolving the rather stagnant Unix model), but supporting a new board is not one of them.

     

    The only special thing that Jason and/or TI need to provide are drivers for AM335x peripherals and Device Tree support and tools, since they're leading DT development for Linux.  And Jason's Javascript-based IDE provides great out-of-the-box experience for BBB newcomers so that's a good thing to pursue as well.

     

    But nothing else.  Certainly not their own distro with its own maintainer(s) --- that's a liability.

     

    Morgaine.

  • in reply to morgaine

    Morgaine Dinova wrote:

     

    John Beetem wrote:

     

    I'm sure Jason would be happy to have someone "step up to the plate" and provide and maintain another distro for Beagles.

     

    A "distro for Beagles" is not required!!!!  The temptation to link the obligatory XKCD strip is strong, but I won't because it's no joking matter --- we have quite enough well supported distros already, and each additional one just dilutes the FOSS manpower and produces yet another documentation and support problem.  There are a few good reasons for making new distros (such as evolving the rather stagnant Unix model), but supporting a new board is not one of them.

     

    The only special thing that Jason and/or TI need to provide are drivers for AM335x peripherals and Device Tree support and tools, since they're leading DT development for Linux.  And Jason's Javascript-based IDE provides great out-of-the-box experience for BBB newcomers so that's a good thing to pursue as well.

     

    But nothing else.  Certainly not their own distro with its own maintainer(s) --- that's a liability.

     

    Morgaine.

    You are correct.  Beagle doesn't need a whole distro of its own, but Beagle does need to have a location where you can download an "officially blessed" existing distro that includes the drivers and tools that you list. Unless this has already been done (please let me know if this is the case), someone has to set up and maintain that web page so that newbies can quickly download and boot.  RasPi makes it pretty easy to get an "officially blessed" distro, while this has been problematic with Beagle in the past, and I don't know if it's been fixed.

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    John Beetem wrote:

     

    RasPi makes it pretty easy to get an "officially blessed" distro, while this has been problematic with Beagle in the past, and I don't know if it's been fixed.

     

    You're right about the "make it easy to get" point (and it's a very important one), but I'd phrase the rest a bit differently.

     

    One of the very effective things that RPF has managed to do is to NOT make any particular distro the officially blessed one --- they just promote them all in proportion to how effective they are at any given time.  With the NOOBS image, they've reinforced that all-welcoming approach to distros even further, limited only by available space on the SD card.

     

    That would be a very good model for BeagleBoard.org to embrace as well.  There is nothing to be gained by picking favourites.  They obviously have to pick a single distro at production time to load into the BBB's eMMC, but the BBB's extras should be installable (with a single command) over the top of any leading distro, the production one not being special.  It's not hard to do --- all the common distros are pretty similar.

     

    Morgaine.

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    John Beetem wrote:

    I'm sure Jason would be happy to have someone "step up to the plate" and provide and maintain another distro for Beagles.  Unfortunately, this is a common problem with FLOSS.  People write and maintain FLOSS for a number of reasons, but the reason is rarely that "wow, I just love maintaining distros and I'm happy to do it for free".

    I think that's something that's easily forgotten. We're used to the x86 distros where the critical mass was reached long ago and they can sustain themselves by selling support etc.

    It's nothing like so simple in the Arm world where the boards are different enough to be problematic, there are lots of them, and few of them will ever sell enough volume.

    Still, the beagles are to some degree commercial products, so either beagleboard.org needs to be prepared to fund some developers (and in a position to be able to do so) or needs to get some support from a distro that's big enough to be self sustaining and who is willing to support something close enough to the Arm generation in use. Hopefully leaving you to just add a couple of bits like bonescript.

    If you're right that Koen was a grad student when this started out, then I believe it should have been trivially predictable that he'd move on in a relatively short time and incentives might not be able to change that for someone who's relatively young and wants to try different things.

     

    Maintaining a distro is a thankless task too, especially for one person if they want to have any sort of life apart from that.  I speak from some experience here as I do maintain my own mini distro, the difference being that mine never really has more than two or three users. Even 100 users pestering for bugfixes and updates would likely make things pretty grim quite quickly, so yes you need a really good reason to keep doing it for free.  Or you need a bigger team to spread the load, funding etc...

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    John Beetem wrote:

    but Beagle does need to have a location where you can download an "officially blessed" existing distro that includes the drivers and tools

    I had a quick look just now and it's surprisingly complex for the whole set of beagle* boards.

    RasPi makes it pretty easy to get an "officially blessed" distro, while this has been problematic with Beagle in the past, and I don't know if it's been fixed.

    It doesn't appear to have been fixed.  My impression is that it's partially down to the whole beagleboard concept generally having some difficulty in seperating the different boards. For example, looking at http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu it's less than clear what you're supposed to do for each board.

     

    Raspi on the other hand gives you some pre-prepared images where they've usually added a repo to the official package management tool which pulls in the kernel, gpu blob, camera & vchiq utilities on top.  I can't come up with a good reason why beagleboard can't do something very similar.

     

    The situation is generally even worse for Sabre-Lite as there's little in the way of a recognisable community like some of the other boards have.

     

    The Allwinner stuff is somewhere inbetween, there's a community around sunxi.org, but a greater proliferation of boards using the same chip dilutes it's value to some degree.

  • in reply to Former Member

    selsinork wrote:

     

    John Beetem wrote:

    but Beagle does need to have a location where you can download an "officially blessed" existing distro that includes the drivers and tools

    I had a quick look just now and it's surprisingly complex for the whole set of beagle* boards.

    RasPi makes it pretty easy to get an "officially blessed" distro, while this has been problematic with Beagle in the past, and I don't know if it's been fixed.

    It doesn't appear to have been fixed.  My impression is that it's partially down to the whole beagleboard concept generally having some difficulty in seperating the different boards. For example, looking at http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu it's less than clear what you're supposed to do for each board.

    Thank you for checking this.  So it's not just me.  It's really too bad, because BeagleB's have great hardware, and if they had gotten their OS act together they might have sold enough units to prevent RasPi from ever getting off the ground.  But then, beagleboard.org weren't really trying to sell "a GNU/Linux box for $X" with BBoard.  They were trying to make an OMAP 3 hardware development board that the masses could afford ($150 versus approx $800 for the TI product) and they succeeded at this brilliantly.

     

    Personally, I deal with Beagle OS by using a 2008 or 2009 version of Ångström on my BBoard and the one that came on the MicroSD with my BBone.  But then, I generally avoid upgrading software whenever possible.