I have spent this weekend on installing ubuntu Natty 11.04 on
BeagleBoard-xM (rev B) following the instruction on http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu. It takes extremely long time
(over 10 hours) to get system and firefox (5.0) installed. However,
the firefox runs very slow.
I also have a BeagleBoard C4 with ubuntu Lucid 10.04 installed. The
firefox on that older board runs actually much faster and performs
almost as good as on the laptop.
Then, I created another SD card to install BeagleBoard-xM again. It is
also pretty slow but the windows manager looks different even though I
use the exactly the same command to install it.
No idea why xM is much slower than the older C4 board.
To get good desktop performance, use a good microsd with a swap file,
or an external usb harddrive with swap..
Ps.. there's a chromium script under /boot/uboot/tools/ that runs
pretty good on the beagle compared with firefox, you'll need the sgx
libs installed..
My beagle board xm runs pretty fast at stock speed and ubuntu takes me usally 4 hours to set up including sgx dsp and sound I also like to use chromium browser but for other light weight options try midori or fennec. And try to use xfce, lxde, or e17 for light weight desktops
That was going to be my recommendation also. When I installed with Unity and Gnome before that the XM was very unresponsive, so I changed to XFCE.
root@g3vbv:~# dpkg -l|grep xfwm4
ii xfwm4 4.8.1-1 window manager of the Xfce project
ii xfwm4-themes 4.6.0-2 Theme files for xfwm4
Regards
Sid.
I was using Kingston class 4 microsd card and put 100MB swap file
doesn't help much. Then, I installed Natty on beagleboard C4. It takes
less than two hours to get xfce, sgx, firefox and midori installed.
Firefox is still not responsive and midori works fine. Maybe, Natty is
just too much for beagleboard and lucid could be a much better choice.