Having Linux already running on the board saves the time and the expense of porting it. The good news is that Linux has been ported to PowerPC®, MIPS, ARM®, UltraSPARC®, StrongARM®, SH, IA-32 and Intel XScale™. The bad news is that these ports do not yet enjoy the same amount of third-party software support as IA-32. Now that vendors are making more frequent releases of their Linux distributions for other platforms, the situation should improve.