Beagleboard-xM

[Heiroglyph]

Any Beagleboard owners here?

Mine just came in today and although it is hardware, it didn't fit in the Amiga hardware forum.

What are you doing with yours?  Running Linux or what?

I'm wanted to play with ARM CPU's.  They seem to be everywhere these days, so I figured this was a good general system for learning.

[Heiroglyph]

Not sure yet, it arrived today and I'm still at work counting the minutes.

It doesn't sound too bad to get linux running, but the devil is in the details.  They never tell you how hard it really is.

I've heard that there are RiscOS, Haiku and Aros (Linux hosted) builds too, but I'm not sure what the status of those are.

[Heiroglyph]

I got the xM from Digikey for $149.

I tried to find a Pandaboard for $179, but those are hard to come by.  There was one available at Mouser the night before I ordered, but by the next day it was gone

[Heiroglyph]

I'm posting from it right now!

I just plugged it in, booted the microSD card it came with and logged in here.

It's a little sluggish, but I think a lot of that is the disk speed (microSD card) and running Gnome.  Yuck...

With a lighter OS I suspect it would be fine for daily use.

John

[Heiroglyph]

I can't get over how small it is.

It's floppy size, but has HDMI, 4 USB, audio in and out, S-Video out, 10/100 ethernet, serial port, plus expansion headers.

[Heiroglyph]

You got lucky, Acorn left a pretty good legacy in place to build on, it just took a long time.

It's sad when you can buy one of these for $149 but the only new Amiga PPC motherboard is $1000.

The SAM has potential that this doesn't (slots, sata), but this is still a complete 1ghz system with OpenGL, SDCard, hardware video decoding and 512MB RAM.  Stick this in an A600 style case with ARM AmigaOS and you've got a cool little usable computer.

I know hindsight is always 20/20, but it's too bad Hyperion doesn't seem interested in any other CPU options these days.

Weren't there MorphOS ARM rumors?

[Heiroglyph]

Why on earth didn't you buy an Efika MX Smarttop?!?

Well, I use mine (Efika MX, I have both a Smarttop and a Smartbook) for web browsing, e-mail, etc, i.e. the same things I spend 80% of my computer leisure time doing, using PC and MorphOS machines. I'm running Ubuntu Linux.

Simple, I didn't know anything about them and I thought Genesi were pretty much out of the picture these days.

Now that I look, other than the hardware hackability, it looks like a decent machine and suggested retail is $20 lower than the Beagleboard-xm.

The hardware hacking was a big draw to the Beagle for me though, I'd probably still make the same decision.

Edit: Looking at the website, Genesi USA is about 5 miles from my house.  Who knew?