Phoronix

Besides the Ubuntu 18.04 minimal spin that is around to 30MB compressed, the Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" installer recently added an option for a "minimal installation" from the desktop Live DVD/USB environment. Here's a look at what that means for desktop users...

Last month Intel open-sourced a new "NEO" OpenCL driver including an LLVM graphics compiler and its compute runtime supporting OpenCL 2.1. I finally found some time to give this new open-source Intel OpenCL Linux driver a try.

The Solaris-derived OpenIndiana operating system now has KPTI (Kernel Page Table Isolation) support for testing to mitigate the Intel Meltdown CPU vulnerability...

Intel open-source developer Ankit Nautiyal has restarted work on adding picture aspect ratio support to the Linux kernel's Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) layer...

Version 2.4.91 of the Mesa DRM library (libdrm) is now available for this component that notably sits between the Linux kernel and various user-space clients like Mesa and the X.Org Server...

With Wayland not enforcing any standard for screensharing, KDE developers are now building off GNOME's approach of XDG-Desktop-Portal and PipeWire for desktop/screen sharing for adding this feature to Plasma on Wayland...

If for some reason you are still riding the Linux 4.1 kernel series, you really should think about upgrading to at least a newer LTS series in the near future. But if you still plan on riding it for a while longer, at least it's getting page table isolation support for Meltdown mitigation...

Last month we reported on work resuming with the Mali T700 series open-source GPU driver called Chai. It's continued with the lead developer now working on an Assembler and soon beginning work on shaders...

We knew it was coming still for X.Org Server 1.20, but now the DRI3 v1.2 support has landed in the server...

While systemd 237 was released just over one month ago, systemd 238 was released today as the next installment of this init system...

While Google has already been using LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler to build the release builds of the Chrome web-browser for Linux rather than GCC and has also switched to using Clang on other platforms, this open-source C/C++ compiler has now been able to replace Microsoft's Visual C/C++ compiler for building Chrome on Windows...

Adam Jackson of Red Hat who is also the X.Org Server 1.20 release organizer has made available a Copr repository for those wanting to test this near-final X.Org Server and updated DDX drivers on Fedora systems...

It was seven years ago that Mandriva 2011 switched to using RPM5 from RPM4, but now for the next OpenMandriva release they are transitioning back to using RPM4 and with that making use of Fedora's DNF...

Intel developers are working on bringing transparent memory encryption support to the Linux kernel that works in conjunction with upcoming Intel platforms...

While id Software founder John Carmack has been known for his open-source and Linux interests over the years and even working on Utah GLX back in the day, he just wrapped up a self-driven "programming retreat" where he was using OpenBSD...

The latest extension proposed for the OpenGL / OpenGL ES registry is INTEL_blackhole_render...

For those wondering how the Linux 4.16 kernel is performing with regards to the ongoing work around Spectre and Meltdown mitigation in the kernel, here are some fresh benchmark results.

Kodi, the popular HTPC software formerly known as XBMC, has put out the first alpha release of their upcoming 18 Leia milestone...

Ahead of the imminent release of X.Org Server 1.20, several other X packages are seeing updates...

Linus Torvalds has issued the fourth weekly release candidate now for the in-development Linux 4.16 kernel...

Adding to the list of operating systems working on memory protection improvements in wake of recent CPU vulnerabilities is Haiku OS...

Caolán McNamara continues doing a great job at improving the GTK3 interface for the LibreOffice open-source office suite...

The UBPorts community continues pushing Unity 8 for their mobile/convergence vision in the absence of Canonical as well as making other improvements. Besides offering Unity 8 to Ubuntu users, they are also working on Debian support...

For those of you excited by the prospects of running ROCm compute and OpenCL off a mainline Linux kernel build with a discrete Radeon GPU, there is an updated patch-set this weekend for testing...

Yesterday Purism offered an update on their Librem 5 smartphone development and how they have begun developing their own custom Wayland compositor. The latest today is one of the developers involved writing about the "HdyStackableBox" widget in development for customizing GTK+ applications for converging form factors / mobile support...

While the original Wine-Staging maintainers have parted ways with the project, a new Wine-Staging initiative has been getting under way and they managed their first development release this Sunday...

Development on KDE Plasma 5.13, KDE Applications 18.04, and KDE Frameworks 5.44 continues at full-speed...

You may recall from last year that Oracle was looking to offload Java EE to someone else. They ended up putting the code on GitHub for Java Enterprise Edition and offering Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation, but that didn't include the name...

The first release candidate of the GStreamer 1.14 multimedia framework is now available for testing. GStreamer 1.14 is now feature-frozen and the official release is expected soon...

While Purism continues eyeing KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell for delivering the user-interface options of the Librem 5 smartphone, they have begun developing their own Wayland compositor and their own shell too...

A premium patron recently requested some fresh tests on Polaris and Vega trying out the AMDGPU OverDrive overclocking functionality on the latest Linux kernel... Here are those tests with a Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64...

For fans of Linux From Scratch for assembling your own operating system, LFS and BLFS 8.2 are released in time for some weekend adventures...

This year's Wine developers conference is happening a bit earlier in the year than usual. The date and venue were recently announced for WineConf 2018, which is also celebrating the Wine Project's 25th anniversary...

The Qt5-written, BSD-focused Lumina Desktop Environment is receiving a big overhaul with its forthcoming 2.0 release...

The xf86-video-modesetting DDX within the X.Org Server 1.20 code-base already has its support wired in for dealing with RandR leases while now Keith Packard has posted the patches for xf86-video-amdgpu...

It had been a half-year since the release of the last AMDGPU DDX release, xf86-video-amdgpu 1.4.0, but today that has been succeeded by xf86-video-amdgpu 18.0 as they also embark on a year-based versioning scheme...

This latest bi-weekly development release of Wine is a bit more exciting than other recent Wine development snapshots...

The Bareflank Hypervisor is nearly two years old and its version 2.0 release happens to be baking...

Oracle is still working on DTrace for the Linux kernel and last year allowed the kernel code to be under the GPLv2+ license. While there are other options these days for dynamic tracing on Linux like SystemTap, eBPF, KTrace, etc, for those wanting to use DTrace, an Oracle developer has posted a new guide for doing so under Linux...

Qt 3D Studio 2.0 is coming this summer, but today marks the Qt 3D Studio 1.1 release as an incremental upgrade for those using this 3D user-interface authoring system that originated out of NVIDIA's open-source code...

Back in January was the announcement of Intel's "Titan Ridge" Thunderbolt 3 controllers that offer DisplayPort 1.4 support and optional USB-C computer port compatibility while retaining backwards compatibility...

It's been several months since last hearing anything about OpenChrome as the open-source driver project still working to create a free software driver for VIA's aging x86 graphics hardware. There remains ambitions for getting this driver to the mainline Linux kernel, but 2D acceleration for now is out, and their DDX driver has been delayed indefinitely...

The Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" is now under its feature freeze. This marks the period now by which Ubuntu developers should be focusing on bug fixes rather than new features...

Intel's i965 Mesa OpenGL driver now allows for 48-bit addressing, which greatly expands the GPU memory limits...

KDiff3 is a long-time Qt-powered program for showing compares and merges between 2_ text files or directories. It's basically a nice graphically-driven diff viewer and has automatic merge abilities, Unicode handling, etc...

With the start of a new month comes a new batch of Steam Survey results from Valve... For February 2018 they are reporting a 0.28% marketshare...

A new release is available of DXVK, the Vulkan-based implementation of Direct3D 11 intended to offer a faster experience for running 3D games/applications under Wine...

Going back to last November has been MSAA fast-clear patches for the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver while today they were finally merged...

After being delayed due to Spectre and Meltdown with the Canonical developers busy mitigating those CPU security vulnerabilities, the Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS release was rolled out a few minutes ago...

A week back I wrote about new Wine Vulkan patches being under review and this week the initial bits have now been merged to mainline Wine...