beagleboard

sea2stars · Post by **sea2stars** » Sat Aug 30, 2008 11:13 pm

Anyone here playing with this yet? Looks like it might be a fun little system to play with.

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lowpowercomputing · Post by **lowpowercomputing** » Sun Aug 31, 2008 2:33 am

Not yet, but it's been intriguing me somewhat and I've been following the development a bit. As long as you can live with an SD/MMC card as storage (or external USB drives) and no support for x86 apps, it can be a great little system with an amazingly low power draw.

sea2stars · Post by **sea2stars** » Sun Aug 31, 2008 6:10 pm

Yeah. I'd love to play with a few Linux distros on it.

lowpowercomputing · Post by **lowpowercomputing** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 9:17 am

Keep in mind your distro needs to run on ARM, right now the beagleboard runs Ã…ngstrÃ¶m.

nightmorph · Post by **nightmorph** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 12:20 pm

sea2stars · Post by **sea2stars** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 2:32 pm

Eh.. toss in a USB hub and you're good to go. LVDS would've be nice on a board like this for embedded applications. I guess there was talk about putting it into the next version of the board; if there is one.

Just came across this Clear Acrylic Case.

Hrm.. maybe if I nix a few other projects I could play with one of these.

theycallmebruce · Post by **theycallmebruce** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 5:39 pm

I've been curious about the idea of running a desktop Linux distro on an ARM board for a while now. Has anybody done this? How did you find it from a practical perspective? How mature / stable are the ARM ports? Is there a distro with a package manager which has well maintained packages for ARM?

Part of my job is developing embedded software for a custom board with a low power ARM7 microcontroller (clocked at 48 MHz), but we don't run an operating system at all. My understanding is that MHz for MHz, an ARM will generally beat an x86 because of all the legacy cruft in the x86 instruction set and architecture which use up gates in the CPU.

Just one question.. this web site is called silent PC review.. are we using the definition of PC which implies x86 here, or does it extend to any device which could be reasonably classified as a personal computing device?

lowpowercomputing · Post by **lowpowercomputing** » Tue Sep 02, 2008 2:16 am

nightmorph wrote:. . . and Gentoo, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Maemo, Mamona . . .

Yes, of course. Sorry that I forgot them.

theycallmebruce wrote:I've been curious about the idea of running a desktop Linux distro on an ARM board for a while now. Has anybody done this? How did you find it from a practical perspective? How mature / stable are the ARM ports? Is there a distro with a package manager which has well maintained packages for ARM?

I've got a Sharp Zaurus SL-C1000 and a Nokia N810. I've installed Debian (armel) on both and it runs well. apt runs fine as well (both are running from an ext3 SD card). It's slow but if you stick to lightweight apps and such, it's definitely usable. Right now, I use IceWM and Xfce4 on these setups and find them to be usable. I'm not used to having a superfast system though, and the advantage of having a full-blown system in my pocket (next to my iPhone

) is more important to me than raw speed.

As for as packages go, that's a bit of a game. Some packages are working well, some need additional work (concerning the armel port) so if you want to dive into this, you should be prepared to do some additional work.

If I think about it, I actually really want to play with one of these. Only downside is that I have no monitor to go with it, but ssh will do.