Hello,
I have Angstrom as a primary system for my BBB. I think I may have one of the first images of Angstrom…
Nevertheless…I still use it for learning and getting to know hardware and software. I was wondering something. I thought maybe someone could help. Can I get Debian on my BBB from Angstrom?
Sincerely,
Seth
Hello Mala
I have Debian running on both a BBB and a BBW. The images are here: http://beagleboard.org/latest-images . With the BBB, you have the option of getting an image that will write Debian to the on-card emmc memory, or booting from a micro SD card. I chose to install Debian by writing it to the emmc. I followed the instructions provided for installing it, and had no problems. The beaglebone white has no on-card emmc, so I boot it using the micro SD card, and that seems to work very well too.
I hope that is helpful.
Hello Mr. Curt,
This is Seth. Can I get the latest image from the current image I have or do I have to download image after image until I have the newest version?
Sincerely,
Seth (maladies)…
If you download one of the images in the link http://beagleboard.org/latest-images, it will get you the version of Debian for BBB as of May, 2014. I’m not skilled enough to know how to get versions more recent than that. I went from Angstrom to that version of Debian in one step. Hope that is helpful.
have Angstrom as a primary system for my BBB. I think I may have one of the first images of Angstrom…
Nevertheless…I still use it for learning and getting to know hardware and software. I was wondering something. I thought maybe someone could help. Can I get Debian on my BBB from Angstrom?
Sincerely,
Seth
Yes you can. I started pretty early using Debian( I started working on this within the first week of receiving our BBB’s ), because that is what I was accustomed to, while Angstrom made little sense to me.
Both are Linux, but with two different root file systems, and perhaps kernel patches. What does this mean ? This means that the biggest differences between the two will be which packages will be available to each. Sometimes different utilities to achieve the same thing ( think dropbear versus openssh ). And file / directory locations may be different.
One could argue that Angstrom is more geared towards embedded Devices. Having many utilities that are built for size considerations. However, it has been my own experience that Angstrom is less flexible, and less reliable when compared to Debian. Your mileage may vary.
There is also the Busybox aspect. If you need a truly small file system. Busybox is probably the “real” way to go. Last I read, I believe that Busybox could fit in as little as 16M disk space, or even smaller. That being said, Debian can be made to fit into around ~60M space with limited functionality. Right now I personally have a custom Debian file system fitting in as little as 178M space. This image currently has a USB thermometer driver / app, With a Nodejs + Express + socket.io working as a web server to stream realtime temperature data to connecting client browsers.
This was achieved by creating a separate file system including all the build tools I needed for the various bits of software, and then transferring the executables to a “production” trimmed down file system. Along with stuff like “apt-get clean”.
Anyway, I think that mostly the distro you use is a matter of taste( subjective ), and this question is really only answerable when you give very detailed information as to how the beaglebone is to be used.