Open is the new black, Intel & Nokia have MeeGo and Google has Chrome but who does everyone else have? Well, everyone else wants to be able to run Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu and webOS. Getting builds of the Linux systems to to run on various chips takes a lot of time and resources. So its actually not surprising that we are seeing all of these heavy hitters the press conference ARM, IBM, Freescale, Samsung, ST-Erricson, Texas Instruments are able to save a bit of money by putting money into a collective pool to make Linux run better across their products.
Now, lets just talk about why the end consumer would care, I love my HTC Legend Android Phone and I think it works great because Android runs great on HTC. But what I don’t really realize is that HTC had to do a whole bunch of coding to get all the bits and bobs inside the phone to works quickly and seamlessly. Now lets talk about where Linaro comes in, they are working on making the middleware, which means the space between the hardware and the software. If you thought that you could just load an operating system right on to hardware with out a few lines of code to make sure they can talk to each other then you were mistaken. All of these different guys who make the chipsets are pooling their resources to collectively make this plumbing or middleware work smoother.
Usually something this unsexy I wouldn’t bother covering but the implications are huge, lets say there is a new and sexy phone coming out, and who ever is building it will have to put the operating system on before the sell it. Which means they have to write the code to make sure that the ARM or Samsung Chips are working this is where Linaro comes in with their collection of optimized code to make this process easier. What this means to you is that your phone could potentially come out a few weeks sooner.
Linaro was founded in March of 2010 and today has released their first build which is available for download on their website here.
