Jamie Bennett Speaks

The Linaro 10.11 cycle was a great success. A huge amount of engineering effort was undertaken and the organisation as a whole has grown at such a rate as to quadruple since its launch in June last year. Whist the main goal of Linaro is to fundamentally change the way Linux works on ARM hardware upstream it is imperative that any changes Linaro does are well integrated, tested, and validated together in a common platform and that is where Linaro’s whole system images are most valuable.

In Linaro we monitor download statistics for each of our images to try to figure out exactly what our consumers want to see from them. Initially, it was thought that a well integrated ‘console-only’ image for testing and verification on ARM hardware would be the most popular, especially as modern ARM hardware usually comes in the form of a bare board at the moment. Its been refreshing to see that our audience want much more than a console prompt.

It seems an Ubuntu-like experience is particularly attractive to holders of ARM based hardware. The list of images we currently produce is being evaluated at the moment to further target our audience but its clear that an Ubuntu-like experience is the de-facto for ARM devices.