Ångström was started by a small group of people who worked on the OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus and OpenSimpad projects to unify their effort to make a stable and userfriendly distribution for embedded devices like handhelds, set top boxes and network-attached storage devices and more.

Our name is Ångström, not OpenEmbedded Ångström. While Ångström is currently using OpenEmbedded heavily through the Yocto Project it isn’t including it in its name. So if you send out a press-release, please use the proper name.

Ångström is versatile, it scales down to devices with 4MB of flash to devices with terabytes of RAID storage. Someday it might even run on a toaster 🙂

The v2014.12 release of the Ångström Distribution was granted the Yocto Project Compatible 1.7 status earlier today!

A disk died dragging the dom0 with it, it should be fixed soon.

The autobuilders are churning out builds at a regular interval but till recently they haven’t been available for download. For people wanting a build with all the latest fixes (heartbleed, shellshock et cetera) integrated in ‘old’ releases, check out the link below.
These will eventually find a better place, but for now you can find the nightly builds here: http://dominion.thruhere.net/angstrom/nightlies/

As of today the Angstrom v2014.06 release is officially Yocto Project 1.6 Compatible! To build that follow the instruction from the ‘Developers’ link above and use the ‘angstrom-v2014.06-yocto1.6′ branch of the setup-scripts repo.

As of today the Angstrom v2013.12 release is officially Yocto Project 1.5 Compatible! To build that follow the instruction from the ‘Developers’ link above and use the ‘angstrom-v2013.12-yocto1.5’ branch of the setup-scripts repo.

As of today the Angstrom v2013.06 release is officially Yocto Project 1.4 Compatible! To build that follow the instruction from the ‘Developers’ link above and use the ‘angstrom-v2013.06-yocto1.4’ branch of the setup-scripts repo.

The v2012.12 release was granted Yocto Project Compatible 1.3 status a while ago.

I am pleased to report that the Yocto Project Advisory Board has approved The Angstrom Distribution as a Yocto Project Participant!

The logo’s will be added to the website soon.

Angstrom is using OpenEmbedded as buildsystem and heavily uses its layer features. Let’s take the v2012.05 release (which matches the yocto 1.2 (‘denzil’) release) as an example. All layers have their patch submission policy documented in a README file in each layer. Here is a summary of those:

• bitbake, the task executor for the build metadata. Send patches to the mailinglist: http://lists.linuxtogo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/bitbake-devel
• meta-angstrom, the angstrom distribution layer. Send patches to the mailinglist: http://lists.linuxtogo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/angstrom-distro-deve…
• meta-openembedded, the openembedded community repository containing a lot of sub layers. Every sublayer has a README on how to handle patches, but the rule of thumb is to send them to http://lists.linuxtogo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-devel with a ‘[meta-oe]’ tag.
• meta-ti, the TI BSP and SoC support layer, send patches to the mailinglist: https://lists.yoctoproject.org/listinfo/meta-ti
• meta-ettus, the BSP layer for Ettus products, github pull-requests work best
• meta-efikamx, the BSP layer for the efika-mx board, github pull-requests work best
• meta-nslu2, the BSP layer for ixp4xx based machines, github pull-requests work best
• meta-smartphone, layer for smartphone recipes and BSPs. See the READMEs of the sublayers.
• meta-intel, the BSP layer for intel chipsets, send patches to the mailinglist: https://lists.yoctoproject.org/listinfo/yocto
• meta-xilinx, the BSP layer for xilinx based boards, send patches to the mailinglist: https://lists.yoctoproject.org/listinfo/yocto
• meta-openpandora, the BSP layer for the openpandora device, github pull-requests work best
• meta-raspberrypi, the BSP layer for the raspberry-pi board, github pull-requests work best
• meta-handheld, a BSP layer for old (and not so old) handheld devices. Send patches to the mailinglist http://lists.linuxtogo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-devel with a ‘[meta-handheld]’ tag
• meta-opie, a layer with recipes for the OPIE project. Send patches to the mailinglist http://lists.linuxtogo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-devel with a ‘[meta-opie]’ tag
• meta-java, a layer with java related recipes (e.g. openjdk), Send patches to the mailinglist http://lists.linuxtogo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-devel with a ‘[meta-java]’ tag
• meta-browser, browser related recipes (firefox, chromium, etc). Send patches to the mailinglist http://lists.linuxtogo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-devel with a ‘[meta-browser]’ tag
• meta-mono, C# related recipes. Send patches as attachment to the maintainer, Autif Khan (autif.mlist@gmail.com).
• meta-kde, KDE recipes. Send patches to the mailinglist http://lists.linuxtogo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-devel with a ‘[meta-kde]’ tag
• openembedded-core, the core layer, send patches to the mailinglist: http://lists.linuxtogo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-core

For the specific example of the v2012.05 release there are some extra steps involved since only backports are allowed in the release branches of the various layers. Whenever possible do your patch on the ‘next’ branch of the setup-scripts to track the latest upstream and then get it accepted upstream and ask for a backport to the matching release branch. Policy on that varies, but adding a ‘[for-denzil]’ tag to your emails will usually do the trick.

Of the above layers only the meta-angstrom layer is controlled by angstrom developers, all other layers are out of angstrom control.