Phoronix

At the beginning of the year was the announcement of the C4 Engine dropping Linux support with its lead developer referring to Linux as "Frankenstein OS" and citing numerous difficulties with Linux. However, quietly this game engine seems to be back to supporting Linux...

The third release candidate for the installer of Debian 8.0 "Jessie" is now available for last minute testing...

We're just into week one of two for the Linux 4.1 kernel merge window. Here's a look at the pull requests thus far that are making for an exciting Linux 4.1 when it comes to new features and functionality...

Turbostat, the open-source Intel program for reporting processor frequency and idle statistics along with other Intel-specific CPU information, will see a few improvements with Linux 4.1...

For the past three years Microsoft Open Technologies Inc (MS Open Tech) has been Microsoft's subsidiary to interact with open-source communities, increase Linux / open standards interoperability with Windows, etc. That subsidiary is now being merged back with Microsoft itself as the company continues to embrace open-source...

The EXT4 file-system updates for the Linux 4.1 kernel have been sent in and it features the file-system-level encryption support...

Version 4.0 of the open-source Ardour audio editing software has been released. Ardour 4.0 brings over a reported 1,000 bug fixes...

Launched this week on Kickstarters was Endless Computers, a $169 Linux PC for the developing world. Quite quickly the project has already surpassed its $100k USD goal...

One week after the debut of the GCC 5.1 Release Candidate, a second release candidate was made available today in facilitating last-minute testing of the big GCC 5 compiler update...

Jaegeuk Kim sent in his updates of F2FS (the Flash-Friendly File-System) for the Linux 4.1 kernel...

The Phoronix Media server infrastructure is being upgraded this weekend with the likely transition taking place on Sunday...

Last year Google announced QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) as a stream multiplexing protocol running on a new flavor of TLS over UDP rather than TCP. Google's been expanding their testing of QUIC internally and the results are showing great results...

It's become public today that Red Hat has joined The Khronos Group, the consortium responsible for the OpenGL, WebGL, and OpenCL standards, among many other industry standards, along with the new Vulkan and SPIR-V standards...

With WiMAX not being too popular and other competing wireless standards taking over, NetworkManager is discontinuing its support for this technology...

As a quick Friday note, if you're looking for a 802.11n/g USB WiFi adapter that's very affordable and will work great with Linux, here's one of my recent purchases. After being pleased with one of them, I've since ordered a few more of these Wireless-N adapters for Linux usage.

Two weeks ago Wine 1.7.40 added kernel job object support (after previously being a feature of Wine-Staging) and now with today's v1.7.41 release this Windows feature has been further improved...

The latest good stuff for the Linux 4.1 kernel are the block core improvements, which mostly are focused on improving the multi-queue block layer (blk-mq)...

This summer there should be six students working on new projects for X.Org/Mesa/Wayland via the foundation's annual participation in the Google Summer of Code...

While GCC 5 hasn't been officially released yet, DragonFlyBSD has pulled in a near-final revision of the open-source compiler for use by their BSD operating system...

For frequent Phoronix readers and open-source / Linux fans, here are a variety of updates to enhance your experience...

With Rust 1.0 now in beta and v1.0 being in good shape, developers are beginning to form plans for what to add to this Mozilla-sponsored language in the post-1.0 era...

Ubuntu 15.04, the Vivid Vervet, is now under its final freeze for its release next week...

With the new GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) versioning where they're going to be bumping the major version number every year, Linux kernel developers are now re-working the way they handle the compiler's quirks/changes within the kernel...

The release of the Fedora 22 Beta was delayed last week due to outstanding blocker bugs. Fortunately, those issues have been cleared up and F22 Beta can now be pushed out next week...

Chrome 42 was just released as stable so out now by Google is the Chrome 43 Beta...

For Debian GNU/Linux users wishing to have ZFS file-system support and libdvdcss (for DVD playback) without having to use third-party package archives, that should soon be a reality...

The first point release to GNOME 3.16 was just officially released...

A couple weeks ago I bought the Lenovo T450s, this is my first laptop-upgrade in about three years and I have to say... I am so glad that I did upgrade. Over the last two weeks I've been using the T450s as my daily-driver and its been working almost perfectly under Fedora Linux.

While we've been looking forward to the new features of LibreOffice 4.5 as the leading open-source office suite, version 4.5 is no more. The next version of LO is now going to be LibreOffice 5.0...

Rafael Wysocki of Intel sent in the ACPI and power management updates for the Linux 4.1 kernel. As usual, there's a lot of new code part of this big pull request...

Qt 5.5 is a very exciting release for new features and functionality being added to this open-source toolkit, but it's continuing in the Qt5 tradition of running behind schedule...

Takashi Iwai sent in his sound driver updates for Linux 4.1, which includes major modernization with the standard bus for ALSA in the sequencer core and HD-audio code...

Just a day after the KDE Plasma 5.3 Beta release is the availability of KDE Applications 15.04.0...

Version 0.6 of GNU Hurd was released today. Before getting too excited about GNU Hurd, it's still bound to x86 32-bit and doesn't offer any compelling new features...

It's going on one month now that our massive new server/benchmarking Linux and open-source benchmarking farm has been operational. So far things are going great and continuing to churn out a lot of performance data for the very latest Git code of the Linux kernel, Mesa, LLVM/Clang, and other projects on a daily basis...

While the GeForce GTX 900 series are in garbage shape with the open-source driver, Nouveau on Linux 4.1 does bring some improvements for the original Maxwell GeForce GTX 750 series along with the GK20A Tegra K1 graphics processors...

Earlier this week I wrote about how it looked like KDBUS would be included in the Linux 4.1 kernel given the pull request sent to Linus Torvalds by Greg Kroah-Hartman. However, since that pull request, KDBUS is taking a lot of heat and there's calls for it to be postponed from mainlining...

As a quick update to the initial Veyron motherboards being added to Coreboot, Google has now added more Veyron boards to mainline Coreboot...

Windows users this week saw the release of an AMD Catalyst 15.4 Beta driver, but if you're looking out for the equivalent Linux build, sadly it has yet to surface...

Lightweight Ubuntu derivative Xubuntu is planning to replace the Abiword open-source word processor with LibreOffice in Xubuntu 15.10. The Xfce-powered desktop distribution also plans to do away with the GIMP image editor in this next release following Xubuntu 15.04...

While full DynTicks support has been part of the mainline Linux kernel for quite a while, it's now become possible to use it with KVM guest virtual machines...

While NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 900 series is dominating for Linux gamers with excellent performance with their $1000+ GPU as well as great Linux OpenGL/OpenCL performance out of their lower-cost GPUs with excellent power efficiency, that's only when using the proprietary driver... NVIDIA's newer GTX 900 / Maxwell hardware is less open-source friendly than their previous generations of hardware...

The (e)BPF in-kernel virtual machine that's been extended to do more than just packet filtering is becoming more useful with the Linux 4.1 development kernel...

The live kernel patching support was one of the big additions to what became Linux 4.0, but with Linux 4.1 there aren't many improvements to show for the past cycle...

It looks like AMD might finally be close to publishing the code to their new AMDGPU kernel driver that's key to their new unified Linux driver strategy where their open-source stack and Catalyst share a common, open-source kernel driver...

Google today announced the Chrome/Chromium 42 web-browser reaching the stable channel and with it comes many improvements...

Just two weeks after VirtualBox 5.0 showed the first signs of life, VirtualBox 5.0 Beta 2 is now available...

The FreeBSD pkg tool for binary package management has been upgraded to pkg v1.5.0. The pkg 1.5 release brings with it a number of exciting imporvements...

It's been a while since last having any major breakthroughs to talk about for the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver stack, but steady work continues. Some recent Mesa commits to Git highlight some code generation improvements...

Following Age of Wonders III going for beta on Linux last month, today this game has been officially released for both OS X and Linux...