Trade Show News

The Beagle Board will making a number of appearances over the next few weeks. Our very own Khasim Syed Mohammed will be at OSScamp July 19th in Bengaluru, India. In the UK, Koen Kooi and Måns Rullgård are looking to show off FFmpeg and Ångström at LugRadio Live on July 19-20.

A BeagleBoard fan group has shown up on Facebook. Currently, only the upcoming LinuxWorld Expo event in San Francisco August 4-7 is listed, but it is possible to RSVP to express interest in the BeagleBoard meet-up. I'm expecting for details on the meet-up to be provided shortly. I look forward to meeting you there!

LinuxTag 2008 winners

And the winners are...

1. Sebastian Reschke
2. Harald Krippel
3. Ramiro Polla
4. Kate Alhola
5. Kees Jongenburger
6. Eugen Dischke
7. Davor Ocelic
8. Robert Bohme
9. Holger Wirtz
10. Jan Luebbe
11. Robert Schuster
12. Florian Boor

Each of the winners has now been contacted and we're in the process of shipping the boards. My apologies for each of you who applied and were not selected in the drawing. Perhaps, you can possibly take another shot at LugRadio Live UK 2008 July 19-20 or at the soon-to-be-planned big BeagleBoard.org meet-up at LinuxWorld Expo 2008 August 4-7 in San Francisco.

And, for those of you who attended our first meet-up at TIDC 2008 back in February, when we first started this mission, we haven't forgotten you! Feel free to express your desire for an early adopter board at 'revb-request' at beagleboard.org and that will let us know you aren't interested in waiting for the platform to mature any longer.

The little things

It is the little things that make me happy sometimes, like Koen adding support for the Linux LED driver.

Several triggers are possible, such as accessing the NAND, MMC/SD, or just a regular heartbeat, as Koen has demonstrated. To list off the possible triggers for the LED driver:

root@beagleboard:~# cat /sys/class/leds/beagleboard\:\:led0/trigger
none nand-disk [mmc0] heartbeat timer

The above shows the MMC/SD access trigger enabled. Koen selected that by issuing the following command:

root@beagleboard:/sys/class/leds/beagleboard::led0# echo mmc0 > trigger

Get started adding your own drivers today by starting with the existing code and the kernel git tree. See http://elinux.org/BeagleBoard#Code (Thanks Dirk!) for references. The patch was discussed on the IRC channel here: http://www.beagleboard.org/irclogs/index.php?date=2008-05-30#T12:04:27.

Meanwhile, Sakoman and Khasim are continuing to to push ahead with the full NAND flash support. All these "little" activities really make me happy. :)

Beagle Board at LinuxTag!

Texas Instruments is hosting the BeagleBoard.org booth at LinuxTag 2008 on May 28-31. You will see Beagle board live demos and discuss open source topics at the booth - Hall 7.2a Stand 122. On Friday, May 30th, there is a two hour workshop about the open source project in workshop room 2 at noon. More information on the event can be found at http://www.linuxtag.org/2008/en/home/welcome.html.

LUGRadio Live USA 2008 (continued)

Continuing from last LUGRadio Live USA 2008 report, the recorded video, "The DSP is Open", is now online and the links are shared on the LUGRadio Live forums. I'm caught speaking about DSP, Open Source + TI devices, and the Beagle Board. The slides are on-line here, as they are a bit difficult to read on the video.

Distros for Beagle

Some may think of the Beagle Board as just another embedded eval board, but its capabilities lie much closer to those of a computer. And as a computer, Beagle needs an OS. Though we are already running Linux, and it’s fine, there’s still something missing. Beagle needs a distro.

On your PC you might use Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, or another distro out there, and Beagle needs one as well. Currently, Beagle is already running Angstrom (OE) (thanks Koen!), but why not get involved early and help Beagle run Ubuntu ARM (Mojo), Fedora ARM, Gentoo ARM, or even ARMedslack?

Beagle patches integrated in upstream OMAP community Linux kernel

Thanks to Khasim Syed Mohammed, the recent OMAP community Linux kernel now contains basic patches for the Beagle board! For initial boot of Linux on Beagle you don't have to apply any additional patches, just download the community OMAP Linux kernel using git, do "make omap3_beagle_defconfig", and enjoy booting your new kernel on Beagle.

Khasim is just getting us started. Expect to see other community members contributing patches to provide additional functionality on the Beagle board soon.