Phoronix

While it's coming late, the huge Mesa 12.0 release is now official! Mesa 12.0 is easily one of the biggest updates to this important open-source user-space OpenGL driver stack in quite some time and will offer much better support and features especially for Intel, Radeon, and NVIDIA open-source Linux desktop users/gamers.

Alex Deucher has submitted the main feature pull request for DRM-Next of the Radeon and AMDGPU DRM driver changes for the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.8...

DebConf 16 is wrapping up as Debian's annual conference, which this year is being held in Cape Town. For those not in South Africa, most of the session videos have been uploaded...

Java Training Wheels has become the newest GNU package...

Oracle has released the first RC development release of the upcoming VirtualBox 5.1...

It's not often we get to talk about NVIDIA developers making open-source contributions to Mesa... After all, their contributions to the Nouveau driver tend to be limited just to the Nouveau DRM/KMS kernel driver and even there seeing patches from the green giant tend to be very infrequent. The latest Mesa patches from NVIDIA aren't even tied to Nouveau but just for wiring up an EGL extension...

Version 1.10 of the Rust programming language is now available...

The nearly finished Fedora Media Writer is looking to take on a greater role with Fedora 25 in making it easier to write Fedora images out to USB sticks...

One week after the launch of the Radeon RX 480, NVIDIA is lifting the lid this morning on the GeForce GTX 1060 Pascal graphics card with pricing at $249+ USD while delivering GeForce GTX 980 class performance. I already have been testing the GeForce GTX 1060 under Ubuntu Linux, but unfortunately that embargo doesn't expire today... But here's the run-down on all of the technical details on the GTX 1060.

Timothy Arceri sent out the latest version of his Intel Mesa patches for the ARB_enhanced_layouts OpenGL extension. These patches finish up this last GL extension that's needed by this open-source Intel Linux driver before it can claim OpenGL 4.4 and then 4.5 compliance...

While we're already one week into July, Mesa 12.0 has been quietly riding well past its June release schedule...

Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been tasked with making improvements to Linux's switchable graphics support, namely for laptops with integrated and discrete GPUs...

Apple has open-sourced LZFSE, a lossless compression algorithm used by iOS 9 and newer and being added with OS X 10.11...

Another batch of AMDGPU DRM driver fixes has been sent in for landing in Linux 4.7...

Canonical developers have been working on new Snap desktop launchers for improving integration of Snap GUI packages with the converged Ubuntu desktop...

If Mozilla didn't already have their hands full with enough projects, the latest they are looking to engage in is a recommendation system to potentially upset the likes of Facebook and Google when it comes to looking for similar sites/resources...

At the end of last year was the untimely passing of Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian who went on to work for Sun Microsystems during the Project Indiana days and then was employed by Docker. Details of Ian's passing have remained quite scarce besides it being reported as a suicide following a sporadic Twitter rant just before his death. New details have now come to light...

Valve will soon be releasing a big update to their Team Fortress 2 game...

For those still leveraging VIA x86 hardware on Linux, the DRM/KMS driver hasn't been restored yet but there is a new xf86-video-openchrome DDX feature release now available...

By now you may have heard that there is the potential for the Radeon RX 480 to draw more power from the PCI-E bus than it's rated to provide. In rare situations, this could potentially cause problems for the system. AMD/RTG is preparing to release a Windows driver fix while I checked in with AMD about addressing this situation under Linux...

Well this somehow slipped under our radar last week and comes as a big surprise... Dirk Hohndel has left Intel Corp after being their chief Linux and open-source technologist the past number of years...

Debian developer Michael Biebl has presented a status update on systemd in Debian at this week's DebConf 16 event in Cape Town, South Africa...

The first milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.6 "Loppa" is now available for your open-source, cross-platform benchmarking needs,..

The first beta release is now available of Qt Creator 4.1, the latest version of this Qt-focused integrated development environment...

GStreamer core, gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-ugly, gst-plugins-bad, gst-libav, gst-rtsp-server, gst-python, gst-editing-services, gst-validate, gstreamer-vaapi, and gst-omx now have out their first 1.9 unstable series releases...

There is a new release available of cf4ocl, the C Framework for OpenCL. This open-source project provides an object-oriented interface to the OpenCL API and offers various other features...

After two years of development, DigiKam 5.0 has been released as the digital photography management software from the KDE camp that's now been ported to Qt5...

The past few weeks I have been testing out the ASUS MG28UQ 4K display as the monitor on my main daily workstation. This ~$500 monitor has been working out well and also supports extra features like Adaptive-Sync once the open-source Linux graphics drivers catch up.

There's a new blog post concerning the state of Flatpak (formerly XDG-App) integration in the GNOME Software app/software store/center...

KDE Plasma 5.7 is now officially out there...

GNOME developer Emmanuele Bassi has shared the latest work he's been doing on GSK -- the GTK Scene Kit and the much anticipated improvements it will bring...

Stephen Webb of Canonical has written about the company's latest project, Libertine. Libertine is their new project for allowing legacy X11-focused Debian packages to run on their next-gen converged desktop with Unity 8, Mir, and Snap packages...

KDE Plasma 5.7 is scheduled to be released today...

There are more change proposals were sent out this morning on the Fedora developer list with plans for these features in Fedora 25...

Announced last year was Bcachefs as a new Linux file-system derived from Bcache that aims for speed while having ZFS/Btrfs-like features. Since doing some early Bcachefs benchmarks last August, we hadn't heard much (anything?) from the project since...

The Lumina Desktop Environment has made available their v1.0 beta release of the Qt-written desktop...

Taking place this week in Cape Town, South Africa is DebConf 16. One of the interesting bits of information out of that event is the codename for Stretch's successor...

The seventh alpha release of the Debian Installer for Stretch is now available...

Linus Torvalds has released the sixth weekly test version to the Linux 4.7 kernel...

The Cairo graphics library that's relied upon by GTK+, Gecko/Firefox, WebKit, Poppler, and many other pieces of Linux software is having problems passing its own build tests...

The folks at CompuLab have announced their latest Linux-friendly PC, the fitlet-RM. The Fitlet-RM is described as "the smallest PC for extreme conditions" and is fanless...

Version 2.1.1 of glbinding has been released, a C++ binding to the OpenGL API...

The second alpha release of Kodi 17 Krypton is now available for testing...

Remember that Improve Dev Board using an open-source, upgradeable design and running Mer from 2013~2014 before the project collapsed? It's back now in the form of a new crowdfunding campaign with some changes to the hardware and the option of a build-your-own laptop...

With the 12-page AMD Radeon RX 480 review under Ubuntu Linux, tests were carried out both with the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver and the pure open-source driver via the Linux 4.7 kernel and RadeonSI Gallium3D Mesa 12.1-dev. In this article are more tests of just the RX 480 when comparing the two Linux driver options for this first AMD Polaris card to make it to market. The CPU usage and power consumption difference are particularly interesting if you have been debating between these two drivers...

If you use Ardour as your digital audio workstation software, you'll want to read this article about the features coming to Ardour 5.0...

Another week, another new Vulkan specification update...

The June 2016 results are now out for Valve's Steam Survey...

Slackware 14.2 was released today to kick off July. Slackware 14.2 has been long in development while today it was christened...

Less than one month after the release candidate to SuperTuxKart 0.9.2, the official release is now available for your open-source racing fun this weekend...