this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Not my main rig, but my most unusual is 32-bit Yocto Linux on an Intel Edison that I got for free from a college professor that worked for Intel.
Yocto is awful. I mean it has a niche I guess, but there is basically no package manager. Somehow I managed to install a Rust toolchain on it, but it couldn't build the web server I wanted to run on it.
I'd much rather have a Pi running a sane distro.
Oh, I remember having to use Yocto when I started experimenting with the BeagleBone Black SBC back in 2015. Yes I remember it being very hard to use. I remember I had need to rebuild the kernel to include a disabled kernel module. The cross compilation on my desktop PC didn't work, so I had to build it on the BeagleBone. That was an awful process, it took about 6 hours.
For anyone not familiar, the BeagleBone Black was an SBC that came out as competitor to the Raspberry Pi 2. The main difference was the BeagleBone used an open source design, based on a non-NDA CPU unlike the RPI, so it meant they published full kernel sources. But in my experiments I found the BeagleBone CPU was much slower than the RPI, and it's graphics hardware was almost non-existent compared to RPIs integrated graphics.
Yah, BBB was horrendously slow. Lots of neat features like realtime PDU and tons of IO, but the only way to use it was Debian headless because a full DE was painful. I bought a 7" touch display to use as an HMI that the BBB mounted on the back of and it duplicated the pins so you could put a cape on it (that didn't conflict with the HDMI pins it used), but I never used it because it was so slow.
BBB is actually really good nowadays compared to where it started. I've got quite a few deployed hardware appliance designs with them baked in. The real time IO and subprocessor was a nice quick and dirty way to get a little psuedo FPGA
It isn't built to be changed after the image is created. I would either just go straight builtroot or Debian.