Beagle - a push for innovation?

Opensource, Me believes thrives and has been so successful 'cause of the very tenets on which its based on - Freedom and community spirit. The freedom to modify software to suit one's needs, and the willingness to share information freely with the rest of the community have attracted me towards opensource stuff. Today, Me strongly believes in opensource and the qualities it brings to software/ hardware.

Beagle being opensource, Me believes, will foster in a lot of innovation. Me thinks that very soon, we'll have products being developed and shipped based on the design/ modified designs of Beagle. Me believes that the automotive infotainment space, personal PVR and projection systems will be the areas where Beagle will foster some good innovation. Mobiles and MIDs might be the other area.

To begin with, Me intends to use Beagle primarily for these purposes:

1. To explore the world of ARM and Embedded Linux
2. To try and see if Me can make a full fledged Car PC for myself. (More on that in a later post)

Here's wishing Me and my beagle the very best!

Beagle, my pal!

Had bumped into Beagle while looking out for some expandable platforms on which Me could try my ideas out. Must admit that Me was totally baffled at the power this small little 3"x3" beast packs in itself. Added to that, interesting videos like this and this and this and this gave me all the boost to go check it out at FOSS.IN where Khasim was hosting a talk about Beagle. Had a very good chat with him about the board, its features and how developers could use it.

And boy! what a revelation that interaction turned out to be! The first shocker was the fact that every part of this little thing is opensource! Right from the schematics to the software that enables the peripherals on the device, to the community based development of solutions - everything. Somehow, never imagined TI going the opensource way. My chat with Khasim firmed up my impression on Beagle even more. Khasim spoke about how he/ the beagle community can help small groups like us explore and try to work our dream products out.

Subbu also told me about how versatile a processor OMAP was and how Beagle would be the best companion to learn building linux devices from scratch.

At the end of FOSS.IN, Me was totally resolved that Me'd give this little thing a good shot. Lucky for Me, Sharat was returning from US, and Me had ordered a Beagle for myself through Digi-key, so he could get it here. Must point out here that the Live chat with Digi-key support staff was one feature that Me loved a lot.

A while later, 7th Dec 2008, Me met Beagle. Sharat was surprised to see that a 3"x3" board had support for so many functions. Its been a good 4 days since. Reading up the system reference manual, purchasing all the necessary peripherals, making up a kit with all these so Me could carry it around etc... etc...

Haven't been able to boot it up yet. And each of those attempts have been learnings of some sort. They'll follow in further posts.

Yes, slowly but steadily, our journey begins.

Me.

Hail Ubuntu!

Me bumped into Ubuntu about an year and a half ago. Around the time when news was doing rounds that Windows Vista required new hardware to run in its full splendor (read eye-candy) and Me was in no mood to upgrade from a PC that Me prided as having the then best configurations.

Actually, my experiences with Linux hadn't been that great till then. My first attempt was with Red hat Linux, but that experience had left me sour - really sour. Probably Linux as a destop hadn't evolved enough back then. Configuration of devices wasn't easy enough, finding information on the net was quite tough and help wasn't readily available. I think Gnome wasn't that pretty too.

What prompted me to move to try Ubuntu was actually, one of these videos. And then, there was Ubuntu's website which claimed that really good eye candy could be experienced even on older hardware. That you didn't have to install to experience it - live cd provided the capability to run it without having to actually install it. That it wouldn't require much hardware configuration. And that it came with this variety of software - office, image editing, media players, etc... - that came along with it. All free. That it boasted of a good user community. Enough stuff that pushed me to try it out.

Downloaded Ubuntu 6.10, burnt it onto a CD and tried it out. Must say, was in for a very good surprise. We will list out all the features in detail in the coming posts, but was pretty much convinced that this is what Me'd be using. Its been a good one and a half year since Me's started using Ubuntu on my home PC. Only a handful of times has Me booted into Windows XP. These days, Me feels strongly about 'Openness'. Me uses open source software as much as Me can and would like to contribute as much as Me can too.

Must mention here about the Ubuntu Philosophy, and the way Ubuntu influences people's thinking. Me thinks that it stands for freedom of software in specific, but could generalize it to freedom of knowledge in general. Me thinks when Ubuntu talks of Freedom, they refer to it in the Gandhian way. Me always believed that Knowledge flourishes when its shared freely, and would foster innovation in a way that no other strategy would.

There's this interesting statement that Ubuntu prints on the CDs it distributes - "You are encouraged and legally entitled to copy, reinstall, modify and redistribute this disc for yourself and Ubuntu. Share the spirit of Ubuntu". Now, compare that feeling of freedom when you read this statement with the one that you get when you read licenses of conventional software that restrict the user to make copies/ distribute it. That feeling is what Me thinks, the very essence of freedom.

Fortunately, a friend of mine, Raghav and me realized that we share similar views. These days, we discuss a lot about Ubuntu. We realized we could just pen it down into a blog, and the result is this blog. We would be posting all our learnings about Ubuntu in general and hope that it would be useful to other folks too.

While this blog would contain details about Ubuntu, we would like to extend it to include stuff about other open source stuff too.

And here we go!

:-)

Me.