Beaglebone Black

[Dirk Broer]

There is no official support for Android on Pi and the B+, being a ARMv6 -architecture- ARM11 -model-, is not very well suited for it too. Raspbian is just fine for it.
I reserve Android for my Banana Pi's and the Beaglebone Black -though I am slowly going nuts by the latter's refusal to boot from SD card.

The bone may have been driving me nuts, but I still got me marbles!
I appears that though the SD card is supposed to flash the eMMC, it is still needed at boot, and you need to connect the bone to a power source other than your PC, otherwise you still have the Debian that is on the eMMC (the 4GB internal flash storage of the BBB Rev. C).

First I connected the bone to my USB-powered hub -I also have an unpowered one which I use the expand the meagre one USB2.0 host port of the Bone.
So power comes in through the Micro USB client and leaves via the normal sized USB2.0 host to a 7-port USB2.0 hub. This I connect to a mouse and keyboard.
I have a micro HDMI to HDMI cable that connects with a HDMI Switch, so all my single boards can use the same monitor, that I connect through a HDMI to DVI adapter.

At first, using this setup, I got the full Beagle Debian -better than connecting the Bone to a Windows or Linux box, but still no cigar.
Then I decided to use the SD card that I had used to flash the bone.
Bingo! Android started!
Then I installed Native Boinc, connected to BAM!... and now it's running....


It looks a bit like this, only my taskbar has less items, just the three on the left.

The different OS/Boinc Client combination has its effect: The Floating Point performance goes up to 277 MIPS (from 184, some 50%!), the Integer Performances drops to 1607 MIPS (from 2047, so about 20%). As it is still Boinc 7.0.36 there is no way of seeing the processor features, but nativeboinc supplies it through host info: swp, half, thumb, fastmult, vfp, edsp, thumbee, neon, vfpv3, tls.