I’ve been running ArchLinux ARM on my BBB for about a year. I liked this version because it is a very basic Linux variant with little fluff. I also tried the official BBB Debian version, which works well but seems to come preconfigured with some packages and content, for example Apache is pre-configured with the BBB website. The official BBB Debian works well and I have not complaints.
I did want to find a basic Debian version and believe I found one at www.armhf.com. I’ve been running this Debian version on the BBB for a few days and it seems to be working well. I don’t know much about Debian having used ArchLinux ARM for such a long time, so I wondered if anyone else was running the ARMhf version from www.armhf.com or if anyone had a suggestion for yet another Debian version that is more of a “bare metal” version.
I’ve been running ArchLinux ARM on my BBB for about a year. I liked this version because it is a very basic Linux variant with little fluff. I also tried the official BBB Debian version, which works well but seems to come preconfigured with some packages and content, for example Apache is pre-configured with the BBB website. The official BBB Debian works well and I have not complaints.
I did want to find a basic Debian version and believe I found one at www.armhf.com. I’ve been running this Debian version on the BBB for a few days and it seems to be working well. I don’t know much about Debian having used ArchLinux ARM for such a long time, so I wondered if anyone else was running the ARMhf version from www.armhf.com or if anyone had a suggestion for yet another Debian version that is more of a “bare metal” version.
Bare metal?
How about Debian in less than 64mb.
http://eewiki.net/display/linuxonarm/BeagleBone+Black#BeagleBoneBlack-RootFileSystem(smallflash)
Regards,
Using Roberts bare-fs rootfs image from those instructions.
$ dpkg -l | grep -c ‘^ii’
135
sudo du -h /
…
137M /
I’d show the results of df -h / but as you can see . .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
192.168.xxx.xxx:/home/william/rootfs 49G 5.0G 41G 11% /
Not very accurate or useful. 90% + of that used space is taken up by the NFS server.
Anyway I’ve installed ntpdate, openssh-server, sudo, and couple other things I can not think of off hand. As is this system is very useful as a basic Debian system ( all networking tools are installed, etc ), but probably less so for for development, depending on what you want to do / use. If you wanted to do your own lets say Node.js based web server, I do not think it would be unheard of to be under 500M easy.
Robert,
Thanks for the link, Debian in 64MB WOW!!! yes, that is REAL bare-metal 
I’m having a great time trying all the different flavors of Linux on my BBB.