BeagleBone Black - WAS: Time for Pi

[Giles Orr]

On 21 May 2013 11:53, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 11:42:45AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>> On Tue, 21 May 2013, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>>
>> > On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 03:19:50PM -0400, Scott Elcomb wrote:
>> > > There's also the new BeagleBone Black
>> > > <http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone%20Black> which supports
>> > > Angstrom, Ubuntu & Android.
>> >
>> > Certainly a vastly better machine than the pi, although the HDMI
>> > video output resolution is not capable of full HD unfortunately as
>> > far as I have been able to determine.
>>
>>   it is not, which is a hard limitation of the pix clock rate of
>> 150MHz for the HDMI framer.  no getting around that.
>
> Well if you could lower the refresh rate maybe... :)

The default resolution on mine is 1280x1024.  Please explain why
they'd use metacity/GNOME on a system with 512MB of memory?  Never
mind ...

I've also found the HDMI out to be somewhat flaky: it randomly blanked
out, sometimes for long periods of time, when going through my
receiver to my LCD TV.  The behaviour has been better, but still not
perfect, connected directly to a monitor.

The BBB runs Angstrom Linux by default.  As mine wasn't running an ssh
server (it's supposed to be shipped with that in place) I was
attempting to get one started.  It occurred to me that it might be a
known problem, so I applied the Debian solution:

   # opkg update
   ...
   # opkg upgrade
   ...

This ran for 45 minutes, apparently updating every package on the
system ... and then locked solid.  The chip was at that point burning
hot.  So tonight I'll go home to determine if I've bricked the thing
or merely munged the onboard installation.  Either way, my original
agreement with Lennart that this was "better hardware" has been thrown
into doubt.  Even if I was abusing Angstrom's methodology because I
treated it like Debian and didn't read the documentation enough,
overheating and lock-up doesn't make me more enthusiastic about the
hardware.

P.S. Android support is reportedly unaccelerated and essentially
unusable.  Broadcom apparently has a working solution but hasn't
released it into the wild.  (I can't find the article that said that
at the moment so it should be taken with a grain of salt ... but the
Android-on-Beagle pages all talk about their "goals" rather than
capabilities.)

--
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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