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 running on members' hardware, and it will make more such demonstrations at in Taipei this week using newly announced hardware.

Linaro on Friday also announced a new partner program designed to help companies and organizations get involved with its engineering effort.

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.

Last week I had a chance to catch up with Linaro COO Stephen Doel and CTO David Rusling about what the group has accomplished so far. From the sounds of it, we can expect to see Linux used better and more often in the coming months in tablets, smartphones and other high-end devices, thanks at least in part to its work.

A Test Farm for Validation