Linaro Non-Profit is Rapidly Hitting Embedded Linux Milestones

For years, many Linux users wished for it to achieve a level of success on the desktop that in never did achieve; however, a funny thing happened on the way to that state of affairs: Linux succeeded off the desktop. Linux is growing very rapidly on servers, and already powers much of the server infrastructure behind the Internet and many corporate networks. Linux is also gaining traction as infrastructure within mobile operating systems such as Android, and the cloud-centric OS Google Chrome. One remaining non-desktop arena where Linux does very well is in embedded systems and applications. On that front, Linaro, a non-profit organization concentrating on embedded Linux, is maturing.

According to Linaro's mission statement:

"Linaro is a not-for-profit software engineering company investing in core Linux software and tools for ARM SoCs.We deliver software consolidation and optimization to our members, and provide ARM tools, Linux kernels and builds of key Linux distributions including Android and Ubuntu on member SoCs."

And who are the members mentioned above? There are some heavy-hitting technology players on that list, including Canonical, IBM, ARM, Mentor Graphics and more. PC World has noted that after a year in existence, Linaro has hit some milestones:

"At the Linaro Development Summit in Budapest earlier this month, for instance, Linaro demonstrated for the first time its Linaro Evaluation Builds for Android and Ubuntu Linux running on members' hardware, and it will make more such demonstrations at Computex in Taipei this week using newly announced hardware...Then there's the 'Origen,' a low-cost ARM development board announced on Monday by Linaro and Samsung that features Samsung's Exynos 4210 chipset and is designed to run Linaro's Ubuntu and Android evaluation builds."

Origen is essentially a development-level board that lets developers test hardware and software concepts on an ARM- and Linux-based platform. In its latest revision it runs a multi-core Cortex-A9 CPU and multi-core Mali400 GPU with 1GB of high end DDR3 memory.

Linaro is still very young, but as PC World notes, it is doing a good job of focusing on reasonably high-end embedded Linux concepts, and its status as a non-profit means it doesn't have to pay favorites. After only a year, Linaro is already starting to bear fruit.