Phoronix:

Well, There Is No i8xx Fix For Ubuntu 10.10 Back in July we reported on a GEM-free UMS Intel driver coming about that was targeted for owners of vintage Intel 8xx series hardware to circumvent the stability issues and other problems they commonly have encountered since switching to Intel's newer driver stack with kernel mode-setting and the Graphics Execution Manager. Canonical hoped to ship this UMS code-path in Ubuntu 10.10 that would then be enabled for those with these older Intel integrated graphics processors...


Happy 3rd Birthday To AMD's Open-Source Strategy It was three years ago on this day that we were the first to detail AMD's open-source strategy. Yep, it's only been three years since AMD became public with pushing out NDA-free GPU documentation and register specifications, open-source code for the xf86-video-ati and Mesa drivers, and employed a small set of developers to contribute towards their open-source Linux stack. It was also three years ago from this month that the now deceased RadeonHD driver was launched...


Looking At The OpenCL Performance Of ATI & NVIDIA On Linux Recently we provided the first Linux-based review of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 graphics card. Overall, this Fermi-based graphics card was a great performer for selling around $200 USD and is complemented by great video playback capabilities with VDPAU acceleration and great proprietary driver support. In that review we primarily looked at the OpenGL performance under Linux, but with NVIDIA's Fermi architecture bringing great GPGPU advancements for CUDA and OpenCL users too, in this article we are looking more closely at the Open Computing Language performance of this GF104 graphics card as well as other NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards.


Open-Source GPU Drivers Causing Headaches In KDE 4.5 Martin Gräßlin, the KDE developer known for working on KWin and working on advanced features like OpenGL 3.x compositing in KDE 4.7, has written a new blog post in which he details some of the driver issues currently being experienced by some users of the recently released KDE 4.5 desktop...


More Details On Unigine's OilRush Game A few days ago Unigine Corp announced OilRush, their first in-house game that's coming from the creators of one of the most advanced multi-platform engines. Unigine developers are also fond of Linux and properly support it with the OilRush game receiving the same level of support and there will be a Linux client on launch-day...


XDS 2010 Has Been Moved To A Tobacco Factory While there is Oktoberfest in two weeks, in just a week and a half there is the annual X.Org Developers' Summit. This year's summit for these developers is taking place in Toulouse, France. The event was going to be hosted at a conference room at the University of Toulouse, but due to delays in renovating that room, this X.Org summit has been moved to an ex-tobacco factory...


Wine 1.3.2 Updates Gecko, Other Changes Two weeks have passed since Wine 1.3.1 was released, so Wine 1.3.2 has been pushed out this Friday afternoon. Though there isn't too much to get excited about in the Wine 1.3.2 release with there only being a few noteworthy changes...


A Linux Demo For Amnesia: The Dark Descent A month ago we reported that the Amnesia game was getting ready for a Linux release and now the Swedish developers behind this game, known properly as "Amnesia: The Dark Descent" have released a demo of the game. Frictional Games has released this demo for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X gamers...


Two Weeks To PhoronixFest... Errr Oktoberfest There is just two weeks to go until Munich's 177th Oktoberfest gets underway (though it's the 200 year anniversary) and again there will be a Phoronix presence this year at Oktoberfest...


OCZ Vertex 2 60GB SSD As solid-state drives are becoming very popular with enthusiasts and a common choice for those interested in high-performance data storage, at Phoronix we have reviewed many SSDs from OCZ Technology including the Agility, Agility EX, Vertex, and Solid 2. Today we are reviewing the next-generation Vertex SSD, which is the Vertex 2, and it promises to offer much faster reads and writes, is rated to last an extra 500,000 hours beyond the 1.5 million hour MTBF of the original Vertex, and is available in capacities up to 480GB.


Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" Beta Released There's just one month and one week to the release of Ubuntu 10.10 (it's being released on 10 October, a.k.a. 10.10.10) but today the beta release of the "Maverick Meerkat" is out in the wild...


openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 1 Released The first milestone release of openSUSE 11.4, which will be released in March of 2011, is now available. The openSUSE 11.3 release came in July and since then for openSUSE 11.4 the Novell and community developers have pulled in X.Org Server 1.9, GNOME 2.32 Beta 1, KDE Software Compilation 4.5, and many other package updates...


Who Contributed The Most During X Server 1.9? Two years ago we compiled a list of the top contributors to the X Server over the years and that was followed by compiling a similar list of the developers behind Mesa. Tiago Vignatti has now compiled some statistics surrounding the top contributors to X.Org Server 1.9 and related X components just looking at this most recent development cycle. There's also numbers for the input, video, and Mesa components too...


FreeBSD Will Continue Supporting ZFS Pawel Jakub Dawidek has announced he has prepared a port of the ZFS v28 file-system for FreeBSD, which is a newer revision of this advanced Sun/Oracle file-system than what is currently available in FreeBSD 8.1. This updated ZFS file-system brings a number of new features to FreeBSD-ZFS users including data de-duplication support, triple parity RAIDZ (RAIDZ3), ZFS DIFF, Zpool Split, snapshot holds, forced Zpool imports, and the ability to import a pool in a read-only mode...


Unigine Announces Its OilRush Game For Linux Back in July we reported that Unigine Corp, the company behind the advanced Unigine gaming/3D engine, was working on its own strategy game. This game was supposed to be announced by the end of July, then in private we were told it got pushed back to the middle of August, but to start off September we finally have the announcement for this new game. Unigine OilRush is the game title and it will be available for Linux. Will this be the best Linux native game we see in 2010?


2010 Linux Graphics Survey For the past three years we have hosted an annual Linux Graphics Survey in which we ask tens of thousands of users each time their video card preferences, driver information, and other questions about their view of the Linux graphics stack. This year we are hosting the survey once again to allow the development community to get a better understanding of the video hardware in use, what open-source and closed-source drivers are being used, and other relevant information that will help them and the Linux community.


Mesa 7.9 Planned For Release In September Mesa 7.9 has shaped up to be one hell of a release with many new features and improvements throughout this open-source graphics software stack. For those that have been waiting for this to be officially released, there's good news and that is Mesa 7.9 should be released by the end of September...


Collabora Is Working On A Per-Window VNC System Collabora, the open-source consulting company that's notably backing the development of GStreamer, PiTiVi, and Telepathy, among others, is now supporting a new per-window VNC system too. Thomas Thurman of Collabora has just announced the first public release of xzibit which offers a few features now, but Thurman has much greater plans ahead for this free software project...


KDE Software Compilation 4.5.1 Released The KDE team has announced the release of KDE Software Compilation 4.5.1 less than a month after the release of KDE SC 4.5.0...


SchilliX 0.7.1 Released Atop The Final OpenSolaris Code Earlier this month there was the release of Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 as the last likely release of this OpenSolaris + Ubuntu Hardy mix to be based upon the original OpenSolaris Nevada code-base with Oracle killing the project so now they have the Illumos OpenSolaris fork to utilize. Today there's another OpenSolaris community OS release, this time in the form of SchilliX, which is the OpenSolaris derivative created by two German developers...


NVIDIA 256.53 Stable Linux Driver Release Over the weekend there was a new Linux binary driver release from NVIDIA that was the 256.52 driver in a pre-release state. It didn't deliver on OpenCL 1.1, Fermi Linux overclocking support, or any other radical features, but it did bring a handful of bug-fixes. Today this driver has been released as stable after being branded the NVIDIA 256.53 driver...


Phoronix Test Suite 2.8 Enhances Automated Testing, Benchmarking The Q3'2010 update to the Phoronix Test Suite introduces new test profiles, provides new analytics capabilities, supports testing under a more diverse selection of hardware and software, and provides numerous other features for those looking to deploy this leading automated testing platform within enterprise environments.


XBMC 10.0 Enters Beta With Plenty Of New Features The developers behind XBMC have announced their first beta release of XBMC 10.0, which is codenamed Dharma. After being in development for a number of months, this open-source multi-media project hopes they soon will be announcing the final release of XBMC 10.0...


Benchmarks Of ZFS-FUSE On Linux Against EXT4, Btrfs Last week we reported that a native ZFS implementation for Linux is soon being released that is based upon the work by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to bring Sun's ZFS file-system to Linux as a CDDL-licensed kernel module. As said though in that article, there is already a ZFS module for FUSE (File-system in User-space) that is already available and with it not living in the GPL-land of the Linux kernel, it is legally allowed, but it does not come without some performance overhead. Over the weekend though there's been some discussions in the related forum thread and elsewhere about the dependability of ZFS-FUSE and what the level of impact on using FUSE really amounts to in real-world usage. We have tested the ZFS-FUSE -- both the latest stable and Git snapshots -- and have compared this alternate ZFS Linux implementation to that of the native EXT4 and Btrfs.


Linux 2.6.36-rc3 Kernel Released Linus Torvalds has just done a Sunday afternoon release of the Linux 2.6.36-rc3 kernel. With the merge window for the Linux 2.6.36 kernel having closed a few weeks ago, the third 2.6.36 release candidate isn't too exciting unless you were affected by one of the kernel's outstanding bugs...


Lightspark Flash Player Continues Marching Forward It was just earlier this month that we were talking about Lightspark now rendering faster and supporting H263/MP3 video when the first Lightspark 0.4.3 release candidate was made available. This open-source project that only reached beta in May aims to provide a completely free software implementation of Adobe's Flash/SWF specification, continues to advance rapidly. Lightspark 0.4.3 was already released and this morning the 0.4.4 release has even made it out the door...


NVIDIA 256.52 Linux Driver Brings Fixes Just shy of a month ago was when NVIDIA last released a proprietary Linux driver, at which point they also released a second driver that was their OpenGL 4.1 preview driver. This Saturday though NVIDIA has provided a new driver release, which is tagged as the 256.52 pre-release. This new Linux driver release isn't overly exciting, but it does carry some prominent fixes that will please some NVIDIA customers...


Canonical's X Gesture Extension Being Re-Evaluated Earlier this month Canonical introduced its own multi-touch framework for Ubuntu that is set to premiere with Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" and it's called UTouch and is joined by their own gesture/touch language. That same day as announcing UTouch for Ubuntu that will support devices like the Apple Magic TrackPad and Dell XT2, Canonical proposed the X.Org Gesture Extension to the X.Org development community. While it's good to see Canonical making more contributions to upstream projects that it depends upon for Ubuntu Linux, the X.Org Gesture Extension is already being re-evaluated and may in fact not be needed...