On Monday, December 23, 2013 10:21:55 PM UTC+1, Terry Storm wrote: > > > A little birdy told me that Angstrom has been abandoned for the BBB ?? > > Terry, I will comment on this topic risking to get some angry feedback from other people posting here. My theory is the following: Koen Kooi was the one who did all Angstrom development and answered all related questions in groups, forums and IRC in the past (just look around). According to his public Google profile he is not working for CircuitCo anymore but for Linaro. Since then, nobody really cares about Angstrom. Angstrom server is down for a long time, no updates, etc. A long time ago, I had also posted some issues + bug fixes to meta-beagleboard but there was no reaction. Most people on #beagle IRC have no idea about Angstrom or Openembedded, so no community support there too. Additionally, Angstrom is a "strange" Linux distro and only a few people know about its details. Afaik it was Koen Kooi who chose it for the BBB for some reason. Another big problem that BBB development faces is the need to switch to device tree. Additionally, I personally don't understand why so much has been invested in some stupid fancy on-board development tools etc. instead of getting the basic things done properly. Maybe this was required by some marketing manager to be able to fool new developers that the BBB is very user friendly and to buy the board...
Regarding the BBB kernel, afaik all the work is done by RobertCNelson who is also working on Ubuntu/Debian development. So what could be our options for the future of the BBB: 1. We can hope that Ubuntu/Debian for BBB get better and better and finally replace Angstrom as the official distro. 2. Another possibility is that TI relases a new version of their EZSDK with support for a new kernel, device tree, latest Qt and 3D. But according to the work done so far, people don't expect much from TI. 3. My hope is that the very active developers at Buildroot soon have good support for the BBB, so we can get access to new software packages and a very good embedded build system and we could finally forget Angstrom. No matter what people tell you, BBB is very very very far from the Raspberry Pi's software quality and its huge community. CircuitCo and TI advertise the BBB wherever they can but their promises are far from reality. Why does CircuitCo still advertise their LCDs as working with latest Angstrom after all the discussions I had with them here in the groups? Many people here tell you that everybody should learn Linux at bare metal level and should be able to write his own kernel drivers to get simple things done. I don't agree, I think that manufacturers like TI and CircuitCo should offer you some working drivers and a stable basis to get started with. We are buying their chips! Currently they don't support us. I have even read postings from expert developers who don't get why the BBB kernel is organized in the way it is, so things are very complex. If you are a new developer you are just not able to learn everything, even if you don't do anything else in your job. IMHO this means: Only wealthy big companies can afford to hire dozens of developers to develop one product they are going to sell in masses. And if this is the only possibility, this is a very very bad thing for Embedded Linux. The BBB and R Pi are wonderful boards for single developers or small companies who have good ideas but don't have the money and time to do everything from scratch. Or like me, they develop products which are needed by e.g. universities but are not expected to ship in large quantities. Unfortunately, the obstacles we currently see with the BBB and most other embedded boards simply prevent such good product ideas to become real products. Small developers and hobbyists are just wasting their time believing the marketing promises of big manufacturers. The BBB has better HW than the R Pi but in the meantime I ask myself - what is it good for if the board does not have working software and if nobody can help you. So I am seriously considering to switch to the RPi. Regards, Anguel -- For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
