It's six months late and X.Org 7.4 still hasn't shipped as its being held up on the release of Mesa 7.1. Hopefully though we'll see the release of Mesa 7.1, X.Org 7.4, and the X Server 1.5 in the very near future...

For the past two weeks we've been talking about the RadeonHD Command Submission branch that changes all of the driver's command sequencing calls into inline functions in order to offer dramatically improved performance. This branch of the xf86-video-radeonhd driver also presents a command submission infrastructure using the GPU's command processor (CP) for the R500 (Radeon X1000) series using MMIO (Memory Mapped I/O). Last week EXA improvements were added to the CS branch of this open-source ATI R500+ driver by means of hardware-accelerated downloading and uploading from the screen...

Over the past few months we have looked at a few different Intel X48 motherboards and all of these motherboards bearing Intel's latest chipset have worked quite well with Linux. Among these motherboards have been the ASUS P5E3 Premium, Super Micro C2SBX+, and Gigabyte X48T-DQ6. These X48 motherboards have been expensive, but now some of the budget manufacturers are introducing models at a lower cost. For just under $200 USD, ASRock has introduced the X48TurboTwins-WiFi. The ASRock X48TurboTwins-WiFi pairs Intel's X48 with the ICH9R Southbridge and offers a few extra features such as eSATA, integrated 802.11g WiFi, and IEEE-1394 Firewire.

We have been covering the Linux benchmarking scene since 2004, but one area we have never really been satisfied with have been the OpenGL tests that are available. There are now plenty of free software games that are available for benchmarking, but with most of them being based around the open-source Quake 3 engine, they aren't that demanding upon the graphics processor. The ones generally good with stressing the graphics capabilities of the system are the id Software games (Doom 3, Quake 4, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars) with native Linux clients. Under the workstation umbrella, there is just SPECViewPerf. On the Windows side though there are a number of OpenGL and DirectX games, tech demos, and other benchmarks. Thanks in part to the Phoronix Test Suite, however, we are starting to see a new era of OpenGL benchmarking that are able to stress the graphics card and are visually pleasing.

We've known about this since April at the last Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit when this event was in planning stage, but today the Linux Foundation has announced their first end-user summit. The first Linux Foundation End-User Summit will take place in New York, NY this October...

For years MythTV has been regarded as the best media center application for the Linux platform and is extremely popular with HTPC enthusiasts. MythTV is open-source and serves as a digital video recorder with support for reading TV listings and it supports a variety of TV tuners. In addition, through various modules the functionality of MythTV can be extended to be an online photo gallery manager, serve as a music player, RSS newsreader, fetch weather forecasts, and provide quite a bit of other functionality. However, MythTV now has a new competitor and that is Boxee. Boxee is a "social media center" that is based upon the Xbox Media Center (XBMC) with versions for Linux, Windows, and MacOS X. What the Boxee developers have added, however, is a social media aspect to media playback. Whenever you are watching something through Boxee, it will record that information and share it with your friends using Boxee and the user also has the ability to recommend the media they are listening to or watching with their friends. Oh yes, it is also open-source.

The xf86-video-intel 2.4.0 driver was released last week with support for GMA 4-Series Support, EXA Render improvements, and other enhancements. Now planning is already underway for the next driver release, version 2.5.0...

Last week from OSCON 2008 we reported that the 2008 X Developers' Summit (XDS) would be taking place from the 3rd to 5th of September, not the 10th to 12th as was shared at XDC. Now this week Daniel Stone has shared more details on XDS2008, which now is only about a month away. There is now a XDS2008 Wiki page, registration page, and program...

Earlier this month Intel had announced the GMA X4500 series, which is their latest and greatest when it comes to integrated graphics processors. These IGPs were greeted by same-day Linux support (it had actually arrived before the chipset was announced), but it's still next to impossible to find motherboards using the G43 and G45 Chipsets that bear this IGP. Fortunately, however, our friends at Super Micro have come through and we have managed to get our hands on the C2SEA. The Super Micro C2SEA is an ATX motherboard that uses the Intel G45 Chipset in conjunction with an ICH10 Southbridge. This motherboard provides Intel GMA X4500HD graphics with VGA and HDMI interfaces. In this article, we are looking at the performance of this new Intel graphics processor under Linux.

Earlier this month we had provided a first-look at OpenSolaris 2008.11 by using an early version that was based upon the Solaris Express Community b93 code-base. Aside from the updated packages, there wasn't much to differentiate 2008.11 from the inaugural OpenSolaris 2008.05 (http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=12269) release...

For those of you interested in open-source Java and are Ubuntu users, you'll be pleased to know that OpenJDK 6 was promoted to Ubuntu main and has now become the default Java Run-Time Environment (JRE) and Java Development Kit (JDK) starting with Ubuntu 8.10. OpenJDK is the open-source version of Java and is compliant with version 6 of Java...

Yesterday KDE 4.1 was released and there are widely known 2D performance problems with the GeForce 8 and 9 series, which are especially exhibited when using the K Desktop Environment. So you think NVIDIA would address this issue in their next driver update? Guess again. Early this morning NVIDIA had released a new driver as version 173.14.12. This is the first NVIDIA Linux driver release in a month and a half, but its change-log is quite slim.

Last October we were the first to deliver a full-review of DeviceVM's SplashTop which was an instant-on embedded Linux distribution at the time found on a lone ASUS motherboard. Since then there has been a commitment to SplashTop on all ASUS motherboards and even on ASUS notebooks. While ASUS has been the primary partner with DeviceVM up to this point, other manufacturers are exploring this market. One of our few gripes about SplashTop is that it's limited in the current applications available and doesn't allow for much tweaking with no terminal access. However, members of the Phoronix Forums have hacked SplashTop. They have been able to run SplashTop from a USB stick on non-ASUS motherboards, boot SplashTop within a virtual machine, run custom applications, and launch a terminal within this proprietary Linux environment.

The KDE community has today announced the release of KDE 4.1, which comes as the first major update to the KDE 4 code-base. KDE 4.0 was introduced earlier this year at a Google-hosted KDE release event...

While NVIDIA's newest GPU family is the GTX 200 series, they aren't yet introducing the GTX low-end models but are continuing to mature the GeForce 9 arsenal. Introduced this morning by NVIDIA Corporation was the GeForce 9500GT, which is a sub-$100 product. The NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT has a mere 314 million transistors, its core is clocked at 550MHz, offers 32 stream processors, uses 256MB (though some AIBs may go for 512MB) of 128-bit 1600MHz GDDR3 memory, and is PCI Express 2.0 based...

For those interested in playing with the latest open-source ATI code but don't want to dive into kernel mode-setting or the new AtomBIOS parser, you may want to test out the CS branch. The CS branch was started last week by Luc Verhaegen as it turns all calls made by the driver into macros...

With the merge window for the Linux 2.6.27 kernel now being over, Linus Torvalds has issued the first release candidate for this next kernel update. In the 2.6.27-rc1 release announcement, Torvalds notes the many patches that were merged and how that totals up to be 12MB worth of changes (50% more changes than what was found in 2.6.26-rc1)...

Cambridge was the Red Hat project that went on to form Fedora Core and it was the release name for Fedora Core 1. Now with Fedora 10, Red Hat has gone full-circle and its codename is Cambridge...

When AMD had unveiled the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and ATI Radeon HD 4870 last month, NVIDIA was left in an awkward position. The Radeon HD 4850 had sharply outperformed the (more expensive, at the time) GeForce 9800GTX, which led NVIDIA to immediately begin slashing prices and introducing a slightly faster GeForce 9800GTX+ that ramped up the memory and core frequencies. ATI's flagship Radeon HD 4870 also had no problems competing with the more-expensive GeForce GTX 260 / 280. Many of NVIDIA's partners as a result have slashed their prices on their earlier GeForce 8 and 9 products. One of the NVIDIA products that was previously considered a good budget graphics card was the GeForce 8800GT, but now how does it stand up against the latest from ATI and NVIDIA? In this article we are looking at the ECS GeForce 8800GT. What is particularly special about this card and some of the other newer models shipping the GeForce 8800GT GPU is a BIOS revision that should yield a performance increase.

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