Tizen 'Larkspur' 1.0 code hits the shelves

Just in time for its developer conference next week, the Tizen project has quietly released the 1.0 version, known as "Larkspur," of the mobile operating system.

Tizen is the result of mobile platform projects hosted by the Linux Foundation (Intel's MeeGo) and LiMo Foundation (Samsung's Linux Platform), and is nominally stewarded by the Linux Foundation. It is still Intel and Samsung who are the primary drivers of the Tizen system.

Tizen's release this week features no binaries, just source code and a new software development kit (SDK) for developers. This makes sense if you think about it: it's hard to compile a binary executable if there's no known platform for the operating system yet. The SDK, of course, has no such problems: it's available for Ubuntu and Windows, with an OS X version on the way.

Curiously, Ubuntu is the only Linux version for which the SDK binary is configured, so it will be interesting to see if there're more community push for other distro availability, since the source code for the SDK is not available to recompile. The SDK included a new browser simulator for coding web apps on Tizen, as well as a better emulator, according to the SDK release notes.

Over in the platform release of version 1.0, there are several new features added to the code, according to the release notes:

• "Web: Support for additional features of W3C/HTML5 specification
• "Location: Support for POI (Point of Interest) and route search
• "Connectivity: Wi-Fi Direct key features added"

News about the Tizen operating system has been few and far between--recent inquiries to the Linux Foundation about the status of the operating system were referred to Intel, and inquiries to Intel were not answered. There were reports in January that Samsung was planning a full-on merge with Samsung's popular Bada operating system, but Samsung appeared to back off from those reports a day later.

Ideally, with the availability of the Larkspur code, the Tizen developer community may be a bit more transparent about the directions the new mobile platform will be heading. The conference that will kick off on May 7 should hopefully prove to be enlightening as well.

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