Samsung will be next month, the first smartphone to release with the Linux distro Tizen. Tizen is the successor of MeeGo, supported by Samsung and Intel. There are still no pictures, and specs of the device.
It is unclear whether the Linux smartphone in the store will be or that it’s just a sample unit will be for developers that are not to be sold commercially will be. That Samsung is a device with Tizen, is in the release notes of the first alpha version of Tizen, that recently is published online.
The smartphone is likely not a high-end device. The kernel of Tizen currently has only support for the ARM Cortex A8 core. Which processor core is used in Samsung’s processor Hummingbird, which, inter alia, in the Galaxy S and Nexus S to be found.
That only ARM processors are supported, is striking: one of the leading companies in the Tizen Association, Intel, which is precisely the market is trying to conquer with its own line of processors. The Medfield-soc need this year to run on Android smartphones.
Tizen is valid as a successor of MeeGo, the OS that Intel and Nokia jointly developed. MeeGo was in turn a merge of the Linux-distros Moblin of Intel and Maemo of Nokia. There are few products with MeeGo on the market. Nokia stopped in early 2011 with MeeGo, Intel withdrew this autumn, the plug out in order to focus on Tizen. Tizen have to be distinguished because it is fully designed on the basis of html5.