Hi Guys,
Simple question: what is the smallest footprint Linux Dist that anyone has made run on the BBB…I want to see if I can get Linux and some additional S/S into the Flash, and while I can minimise my added software, I also want to uae the smallest didt to maximise room for my stuff
Thanks
Jim
Funny 
the same/similar question I have asked few days ago in the Ubuntu-forum. There are some response already there…
leo
I seem to recall that someone was trying to set up OpenWRT on a Beagle of
some sort. OpenWRT is designed for machines with very small amounts of
flash so it might be suitable. Now that most of the device support is
in the standard kernel this should be relatively easy to achieve.
David
It depends on what you need to achieve. If you just need a command line then you can compile just busybox in minutes and have fun, but if you need a some sort of server software or a database then manual compilation can be very tricky due to unresolved dependences. In the latter case it is easier to use OS with a repository like Angstrom, Ubuntu and similar. However using such advanced OS’s has one disadvantage - a lot of space is occupied by unnecessary scripts, libraries and utilities. So if you are a profi in software then you can compile everything yourself making the final image very tiny. If not then use Ubuntu
Hi,
Puppy Linux for ARM might be a good place to start, especially in view of its union filesystem.
Will
Have you checked out Arch Linux, http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/ti/beaglebone-black? A part of the core philosophy is to start from a minimal root file system. On a fresh install I show 415M used. Quite a bit smaller than the 1.5G showing on my (non-fresh) install of Angstrom.
Eric Westphal
Hi,
Maybe we have here a different notion of what’s small here;)
Anyhow that’s what I’ve got on a beagle bone white with a yocto minimal rootfs:
root@beaglebone:~# cat /proc/cmdline
console=ttyO0,115200n8 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 ro rootfstype=ext4 rootwait
root@beaglebone:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 7.2G 26.4M 6.8G 0% /
devtmpfs 122.2M 4.0K 122.2M 0% /dev
tmpfs 122.4M 176.0K 122.2M 0% /var/volatile
tmpfs 122.4M 0 122.4M 0% /media/ram
/dev/mmcblk0p1 63.9M 17.8M 46.1M 28% /media/mmcblk0p1
root@beaglebone:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
model name : ARMv7 Processor rev 2 (v7l)
BogoMIPS : 710.04
Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee neon vfpv3 tls
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant : 0x3
CPU part : 0xc08
CPU revision : 2
Hardware : Generic AM33XX (Flattened Device Tree)
Revision : 0000
Serial : 0000000000000000
root@beaglebone:~#