Beagle board: Is it suitable for driver development and learning

Hi All,

Recently I became interested in opensource tools and Linux. Being a
person who
learns from hand-on I am about to purchase a board and considering
buying Beagle board.

I need your experience with beagle board and Linux to answer my
questions :

1. Is beagle board suitable for low level driver development(spi, i2c
and other peripherals supported by the controller it runs on). To me
it seems that beagle board is just a plug and play device for its just
like assembling your pc. connect monitor, connect keyboard , speakers
and your laptop is ready.

2. Are there open source tools available for development? Like gcc
toolchain, support for openOCD, JTags. Because I see that beagle
board comes just as a board without any ready to run development cd.

3. Basically I just want a board which must be able to run linux. Are
there any cheaper options available than beagle board.

-Cheers
Rohit

Hi All,

Recently I became interested in opensource tools and Linux. Being a
person who
learns from hand-on I am about to purchase a board and considering
buying Beagle board.

I need your experience with beagle board and Linux to answer my
questions :

1. Is beagle board suitable for low level driver development(spi, i2c
and other peripherals supported by the controller it runs on). To me
it seems that beagle board is just a plug and play device for its just
like assembling your pc. connect monitor, connect keyboard , speakers
and your laptop is ready.

All the peripherals mentioned in your list are on expansion header,
you can try out.
Beagleboard is a open hardware, Desktop is one such applications, see
Projects Archive - BeagleBoard to get a feeling of how others are
using beagleboard.

2. Are there open source tools available for development? Like gcc
toolchain, support for openOCD, JTags. Because I see that beagle
board comes just as a board without any ready to run development cd.

Tools, software is available and free to download.
http://code.google.com/p/beagleboard/wiki/BeagleboardRevCValidation

3. Basically I just want a board which must be able to run linux. Are
there any cheaper options available than beagle board.

There are so many available, look for one where there is community to
help you in learning and recognize your efforts. If cost is your
concern you can back on http://hawkboard.org but that will be
available for mass market only after Dec.

Regards,
Khasim