BeagleBone Black - WAS: Time for Pi

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 12:10:45PM -0400, Giles Orr wrote:
> 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.

Better by spec.  I wouldn't run a 1GHz system without a heatsink.

And ARMv7 is better than an ARMv6.  Real ethernet is better than usb
ethernet.

> 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.)

-- 
Len Sorensen
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