Your opinion of Angstrom is familiar to me - I was exactly where you are a couple of months ago. I have since come around though and prefer the Angstrom distribution. Yes, the learning curve is steep (bitbake and device trees are really confusing at first, and I also pulled my hair out over wifi issues), but now I’m loving how light weight Angstrom is and how quickly it boots compared with Ubuntu. I’ve also been really impressed with the responsiveness of the TI engineers working tirelessly to improve the distribution. I think they’ve made the correct call long term, but you’ve got a point that it’s painful now.
There are no TI engineers working on Angstrom. TI has a few people working on the kernel, but none on angstrom.
Koen is correct. Nor are they working on Ubuntu, Arch Linux, etc. either. TI has NO kernel support for the 3.8 kernel at all as a matter of fact, not until 4Q as has already been mentioned in the forum before.
Gerald
Fair enough. From my perspective though Pantelis responded to a problem that I was having with my distribution, and whether the fix occurred upstream and wasn’t really associated with Angstrom was immaterial to me. I just appreciated the help, and the end result was a better distribution.
These guys are working very hard to get all this stuff working correctly!
Gerald
Gerald,
I’ve been involved in embedded Linux, both as an occupation and as a hobbyist, for well over a decade, so I bought the two Beaglebone Black (BBB) PCBs that I have with my eyes wide open. The BBB hardware design look very good to me. I like the TI ARM processor a lot. My only complaint might be the single USB master port.
I get it that THEY are working VERY HARD…but it is clear to me now, after several days fighting with Angstrom on BBB, that what is shipped with the BBB and/or available from BeagleBoard.Org is a work in progress. Reminds me of the chaos with the firmware and device support on Gumstix years ago.
Anyway, I’ve found the BBB solid as a rock when running Ubuntu. That’s what I’m recommending to my friends and colleagues.
Maybe I’ll be surprised. You can depend upon me to report back if that is the case. 
Best regards,
I appreciate all feedback. We have always relied on help from TI with Kernel support. In this instance, that support has been moves out to 4Q of this year, we hope. We are working to fill those gaps as quickly as possible. The people that are working on this are also working on cape support, something that was broken on the 3.8 kernel. That is taking up their time as well.
Gerald
Gerald,
I’ve got to take what I said back. Ubuntu is better than Angstrom, but not stable at all with USB WiFi—under any kind of networking load, despite what Adafruit and others might put on their Websites. (You can’t put stuff on the Internet that’s not true, can you!?
As promised, here’s my “report back”. My two BeagleBone Black PCBs are going on the shelf.
Thank you for taking the time to talk with me on the telephone. I do hope that you can get all the “cats herded” and somehow do what you did for the original BeagleBoard hardware—with or without the support of Texas Instruments—and despite Linus Torvalds’ constant, seemingly fundamental, changes to the kernel (e.g., device trees)
Best regards,
Bruce D. Lightner