Angstrom

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.

Probably about as close as an official response you're likely to get from Jason in this thread:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/beagleboard/GK8Chte-4Xs

I don't think there's any huge surprise that his requirements seem to come down to bonescript, capemgr and dtbo's for known capes on top of <insert OS here>.

What I find interesting is that they're prepared to discuss a move, have sensible requirements before doing so, and have obviously been doing some work around getting a version of Debian to that point already. I'd not seen anything suggesting it would even be open for discussion previously.

selsinork wrote:

 

Probably about as close as an official response you're likely to get from Jason in this thread:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/beagleboard/GK8Chte-4Xs

 

I don't think there's any huge surprise that his requirements seem to come down to bonescript, capemgr and dtbo's for known capes on top of <insert OS here>.

What I find interesting is that they're prepared to discuss a move, have sensible requirements before doing so, and have obviously been doing some work around getting a version of Debian to that point already. I'd not seen anything suggesting it would even be open for discussion previously.

That's good news on Debian.  I'll be looking forward to it -- I wonder if it can run decently on a 128MB BeagleBoard B4?

John Beetem wrote:

 

I wonder if it can run decently on a 128MB BeagleBoard B4?

I wouldn't like to guess.  In the end, base requirements will continue to rise, pushed ever upwards by x86 systems that will reasonably have terabyte drives and 8-16Gb ram. Trying to push an OS designed with easy availability of resources onto an Arm board that more closely resembles where x86 was a decade or more ago can't be the easiest of things to do.

I'm not convinced Debian is the best choice for an embedded board, but then I don't really have a better idea. Debian does have the advantage of having a much bigger pool of active developers than we could hope for on a beagle* only distro. 

selsinork wrote:

 

Probably about as close as an official response you're likely to get from Jason in this thread:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/beagleboard/GK8Chte-4Xs

Excellent news, many thanks for bringing that to our attention!

I don't have any special likes nor dislikes about Debian, and view it simply as "a well-supported distro that works".  That's the primary requirement for all distro choices in my book, and Angstrom failed on both counts.  I've been installing Debian on nearly all my BBBs, mostly for symmetry to simplify maintenance, but I'd be happy with any distro that meets the primary requirement.  (I don't use Debian on my x86 desktops nor servers, so I'm not extending past preferences to my choices for ARM.  It's strictly horses for courses.)

I think BeagleBoard.org and TI are going to benefit greatly from this likely change, not only broadening their appeal in the Linux community but also reducing problem reports and support costs, since much of the time reported problems were created entirely by Angstrom.  It gave their very fine hardware a tarnished reputation for software.

So, I'm very hopeful.  I have my fingers crossed that the next board in the BeagleBone series will feature a different distro pre-installed on eMMC.

Morgaine.

John Beetem wrote:

 

That's good news on Debian.  I'll be looking forward to it -- I wonder if it can run decently on a 128MB BeagleBoard B4?

I've run Linux in 16MB of RAM and it's known to run in a lot less than that, so the answer is undoubtedly "yes" as far as the kernel is concerned.  Although the kernel codebase has grown massively over the years, it's so modular that tiny kernels can still be configured.

On the user-space side, to make a distro fit a small embedded board just requires disabling superfluous subsystems, of which there are typically vast numbers in any modern distro.  I doubt that 128MB represents a serious constraint at all for an embedded environment.  This even applies to desktops, but there it's subject to personal expectations of what needs to be present.  Some people require not only the kitchen sink to be running, but 5 of them simultaneously.

Morgaine.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

I've run Linux in 16MB of RAM and it's known to run in a lot less than that, so the answer is undoubtedly "yes" as far as the kernel is concerned.  Although the kernel codebase has grown massively over the years, it's so modular that tiny kernels can still be configured.

I first used Unix on a 256KB PDP-11/45, with multiple users.  If two people compiled at the same time it would slow down a bit, but normally people were editing (using ed, natürlich) so the PDP-11/45 could support quite a few users.

While a 128MB BeagleBone is physically small, I like to think of it as a small mainframe and bloat-free software runs quite well.

John Beetem wrote:

 

I first used Unix on a 256KB PDP-11/45, with multiple users.

...

While a 128MB BeagleBone is physically small, I like to think of it as a small mainframe

Ah, the reminiscing.

Well a PDP-11/45 almost was a mainframe, compared to its younger sibling PDP-11/34 on which I first ran Unix V6 and V7 (and something called "mini-Unix" prior to V6).  Unfortunately I can't remember how much RAM it had, but the likelihood is less than your 11/45.  We didn't have a lot of money ...

I never had a chance to bring up Unix on our 11/20, as it got upgraded to the 11/34 at the same time as I was discovering the joys of "ls -l" and "cc -c" on another department's larger PDPs, but it probably had even less memory and was still known to run Unix.

Anyway, back in Linux time, I think we can safely say that the Linux kernel is happy with any amount that one is likely to find on an ARM applications processor board.

Morgaine.

John Beetem wrote:

and bloat-free software runs quite well.

good luck finding anything bloat-free these days

selsinork wrote:

 

good luck finding anything bloat-free these days

LFS qualifies!

Being required to know what each piece does puts a very severe cap on bloat.

Morgaine.