The Gumstix Overo - a miniature X Window System platform [LWN.net]

The Gumstix Overo - a miniature X Window System platform

Posted Nov 15, 2008 3:38 UTC (Sat) by dmag (subscriber, #17775)
Parent article: The Gumstix Overo - a miniature X Window System platform

I immediately compared it to the Beagle Board ( http://beagleboard.org/ ). It's the same price, but aimed at completely different markets. Basically, if you want deep embedded (extremely tiny, add your own I/O), then the GO looks neat. If you want a small "embedded" desktop, then the BB is cool. Some specs:

BB: OMAP 3530 superscaler ARM Cortex -A8
GO: OMAP 3503 Application Processor with ARM Cortex-A8 CPU

Both: 600 MHz 256MB Flash

128MB RAM on BB, 256MB RAM on GO (wow!)

The BB is a full desktop (DVI, audio, USB, etc) right out of the box. The GO can do a lot of that, but requires a $60 add-on board. Also, the BB has been shipping for a while.

(Log in to post comments)

The Gumstix Overo - a miniature X Window System platform

Posted Nov 15, 2008 11:35 UTC (Sat) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link]

There's one thing that's not clear to me about the Overo: the wifi and bluetooth support.

The Overo (without expansion board) lacks lots of connections, but has some general purpose IO pins that could come handy in an embedded project. If it also had wireless included in the price that would make it really attractive.
But I did not find a description of the wireless support on the Gumstix site.

One final issue is whether the Overo CPU is as powerful as the Beagleboard one...

The Gumstix Overo - a miniature X Window System platform

Posted Dec 3, 2008 4:00 UTC (Wed) by HalfMoon (guest, #3211) [Link]

Overo includes Bluetooth and WLAN; they work just fine on mine, once I hook up their antennae.

It's the same ARM cpu ... but the Beagle is a higher end version, which also includes the OpenGL engine, C64+ DSP, and video accelerator.

I'd expect the 2.6.29 kernel will support most of the features of these boards out-of-the-box, possibly excepting the DVI (and for Beagle, S-Video) output for which I don't know that mainline will behave. Of course, there's still a boatload of OMAP support that's not yet in mainline. That may matter to you if you hook it up to something other than the standard buddyboard.