Just got my B^3 and have heard that Angstrom is not a very good OS.
I will be using it for projects (I2C, A/D, and GPIO), with Adafruit’s GPIO python module.
Which one is the best? Ubuntu, Debian, other?
Jerry
Actually, the best is the one you want to use most. So, in other words, you’re asking a subjective question.
The kernel between Ubuntu and Debian is the same, the only difference is the rootfs, where Ubuntu uses upstart, while Debian uses a more traditional init.d init daemon.
If you do not have much hands on with either, then either would probably work fine for you. My own personal preference is Debian, because I have had years of hands on with it.
Also with Debian, you can use systemd. Just add the option to uEnv.txt as follows: #Optional arguments optargs=init=/bin/systemd
To be sure, there is more than what little i mentioned. In the PC world Ubuntu is known as the user friendly Debian based distro, where Debian is light weight, known to be super solid and preferred for servers / mission critical applications.
However in the case of the BBB I think the differences are considerably blurred by comparison. Since we’re not very likely to run Compiz for a “beautiful” desktop on our BBB’s, and numerous other points.
To be sure, there is more than what little i mentioned. In the PC world Ubuntu is known as the user friendly Debian based distro, where Debian is light weight, known to be super solid and preferred for servers / mission critical applications.
However in the case of the BBB I think the differences are considerably blurred by comparison. Since we’re not very likely to run Compiz for a “beautiful” desktop on our BBB’s, and numerous other points.
I’ve always used Ubuntu for my Desktop and over the last few releases, Ubuntu has become more flaky so I had heard that Debian is rock solid as you said. I started out with Debian Wheezy 7.4 and noticed that the kernel was still at V3.2 which seems really old. What I also noticed is the Debian package manager isn’t as comprehensive as Ubuntu and I have to track down tons of third party repos to get the packages I needed. I also had issues with the nouveau driver for my Nvidia 670 card so I installed the Nvidia native driver and that seemed to work better. From what I’ve read, the Debian Testing repo is also very reliable (better than Ubuntu) so I updated and now the kernel is v3.13. BTW, I found Gnome on Debian to be flaky (both on Wheezy and Sid). For example, updating the desktop background causes a segfault. This is a known issue and there are several suggesting workarounds, but no fixes yet. Maybe I’m missing something here.
Debian is my preferred solution for BBB, but for now I think I’m going to stick with flaky Ubuntu for my Desktop. Anyone have any experience with MINT?
Regards,
John
Very little John, but know that MINT has two “inner distro’s” You have regular which is based on Ubuntu, and LMDE which is Linux Mint Debian Edition( testing branch). I tried LMDE and was not impressed.
Debian IMHO isn’t meant as a desktop OS, although some people use it as such and it works very well for them. For me Debian is perfect for how I personally think the BBB should be used. Which is to say, not a desktop replacement.
Very little John, but know that MINT has two “inner distro’s” You have regular which is based on Ubuntu, and LMDE which is Linux Mint Debian Edition( testing branch). I tried LMDE and was not impressed.
Debian IMHO isn’t meant as a desktop OS, although some people use it as such and it works very well for them. For me Debian is perfect for how I personally think the BBB should be used. Which is to say, not a desktop replacement.
Thanks William. Ubuntu would be perfect for me if they only dropped Unity. I hate Unity, but I haven’t found anything that works better. At the moment, I’m using a tool that is based on QT and it crashes when I use the file dialog (open, save, etc). It doesn’t crash every time, but more often than not. Apparently this is a known issue with QT and Ubuntu. The vendor was able to reproduce the error, but when they loaded QT debug symbols, they cannot reproduce the error. I loaded QT debug symbols and it still crashes for me. What a nightmare. The vendor says the tools is stable in Debian so that was my I was looking at Debian.
Regards,
John
IMHO for me, the best compromise between stability and some UI friendliness is CruchBang http://crunchbang.org/
Thanks David. I use a lot of tools from companies like TI, Lauterbach, BeyondCompare, etc, and I can imagine the response I would get when I report a bug if I used an unknown distro like CrunchBang. Does look interesting though.
Regards,
John