Got me a BeagleBone Black today.

[__]

I’ll be removing everything that came on it though.

Yeah. I planned on keeping Angstrom at first. That idea lasted all of two hours.

I think I’m going to partition the SD card like normal… then see how much space I’m taking up with all my packages. I would imagine that it’s going to be under 2GB.

I would think so. (I believe) Arch ARM by itself is under 512MB.

Does Arch Linux ARM even use GRUB?

BBB comes with UBoot.

…swap? It just makes me nervous with only 512 MB of RAM

I had though about that, but forgot. At one point I was actually trying to figure out if I could use the whole eMMC as swap, but I didn’t find an answer. Maybe I’ll start investigating that again. If that’s possible, yes, I may well keep the OS on the SD card.

[nixnerd]

BBB comes with UBoot.

Do you create a partition for it or do you just create a boot partition?

Let me know if you figure out the whole swap thing. I’m curious about that myself.

[__]

I haven’t actually flashed anything to the eMMC yet. Arch says there’s no need to re-partition, though.

I’ll certainly keep you in the loop regarding the swap. The more I think about it, though, the more I think there’s no reason it wouldn’t work.

I found another cool thingy, BTW. 1.2GHz quad core, 1GB RAM, swappable internal SD card + external SD card, onboard wifi (b/g/n) and bluetooth.

[nixnerd]

Wow! Those are IMPRESSIVE specs. But how do you add peripherals to it? Is the point that you don’t? Or do you have to crack the enclosure off?

Seems like that would be an AWESOME device to hook up to your TV/Entertainment system.

[__]

Seems like that would be an AWESOME device to hook up to your TV/Entertainment system.

That’s the idea; it’s not intended for hardware hacking. But the fact that you can switch out the internal SD card means that you can put whatever kernel you like.

But forget I mentioned it; this one is 1.6GHz quad core with 2GB RAM, plus GPIOs, and it’s only $15 more.

[nixnerd]

Wow. That’s legitimately enough to probably run LXDE or XFCE on.

[nixnerd]

Out of curiosity… are you concerned about updates on this project? I’m a little scared about using Arch for this project, as its a rolling release. Updates do break things on occasion.

That being said, I feel like Arch is almost inherently more stable due to how simple it is. The base install is little more than the Linux kernel. As long as I just stick to a few packages from the official repos… I should be good wouldn’t you think?

Plus, if I’m running 30+ of these little systems… I could just keep one for testing and update that one before the rest to make sure package updates are stable.

I think it’s easier to build up Arch than strip down Debian. That’s mainly what it comes down to. Plus… Arch has much better docs. Sorry, but it’s a fact. That plays a huge role for me.

[nixnerd]

After reading through this… I’m not worried.

It’s just that on this project… I am concerned about stability. But I’m mainly concerned about performance. That being the case… I feel like Arch is the only way to go. People talk about how wildly unstable it is but I don’t see how that can possibly be the case. If you’re installing a bunch of exotic nonsense from a github repo… yeah, fine. But if you’re using mainstream packages and ESPECIALLY if you’re running the LTS kernel… all should be well in BBB land!

[__]

I think all should be well. The craziest stuff you’re doing (IIUC) is the camera driver, right? I’m not even sure you’d need the LTS kernel. Just don’t pacman -Syu.

[nixnerd]

But these will be connect to the Internet. I will miss out on security updates.

[__]

Well, like you said, update one first and see what happens.

[nixnerd]

That sounds like the ticket. It’s just that Arch is SO simple! Why incur an added level of entropy by using a bloated system I didn’t build and don’t understand?

I’ll stick to my gut.

[__]

Beginning to wonder if there is a limit to this insanity.

[__]

Also, news on the swap issue. I still don’t see any reason you couldn’t make a swap partition on the eMMC, but if not, creating a swapfile is known to work.

[nixnerd]

Beginning to wonder if there is a limit to this insanity.

Apparently not! Where are all these coming from??? And how are you finding these obscure ARM computers?

The only problem is that your swap partition would take up all the space on the board. That is, if you do the 4:1 rule. Then, everything else will have to live on the SD… At which point it seems like a performance wash. Maybe you could just make your swap twice as big as RAM?

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