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If all goes according to plan, the Linux 4.2 kernel merge window will close this afternoon followed by the immediate release of the Linux 4.2-rc1 test version. With all major pull requests having already been submitted for Linux 4.2, here's an overview of the exciting new features and changed functionality to look forward to with this kernel version to officially debut later this summer!

For the past four years in systemd there's been a Udev accelerometer helper for exposing the device orientation as a property. With the upcoming systemd 222 release, that will change and instead users taking advantage of device orientation information should switch to iio-sensor-proxy 1.0+...

For developers that may be experienced with advanced C/C++ programming, dealing with graphics drivers is a very different beast, and thus for individuals wanting to get involved there are often lots of questions simply about how to get started...

A few more input driver updates were mailed in this morning for the Linux 4.2 kernel. This second input update for this next kernel version has better Xbox Wireless Controller support thanks to a patch from Valve...

One of the later pull requests for the Linux 4.2 kernel merge window is a big rework to the NTB (Non-Transparent Bridge) core code...

A few days ago Amazon revealed a project that they had been working on over the last few months: s2n. s2n is a new, open source, implementation of the TLS protocol...

Torque 3D 3.7 was released last week as the new version of this advanced game engine that's been open-source for the past three years...

Rob Clark has shared a new blog post today about "happy (gpu) independence day" with his work on the open-source Freedreno driver for freeing Qualcomm Linux users of the Adreno binary blob...

For those in the US not busy celebrating Independence Day, come check out the brand new, completely redesigned Phoronix.com site. This new site is in beta but is publicly available and should yield a much better experience, particularly for smartphone and tablet readers...

There's been various one-time password features in the works for OpenLDAP -- the popular open-source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol -- in various code-bases while now within their mainline Git tree they have time-based one-time password (TOTP) support...

While the Linux 4.2 kernel merge window isn't even over yet, Intel developers already have new code ready for testing that will be merged eventually for Linux 4.3...

In working toward GNOME 3.17.4 later this month, the next version of the GTK+ tool-kit will receive a number of file chooser improvements and other work...

Emil Velikov rolled out Mesa 10.5.9 this morning as the last planned release of the Mesa 10.5 series...

A few days ago I received the Intel Core i7 5775C for Linux testing, one of the first Broadwell desktop/socketed chips featuring Iris 6200 graphics. In the days since, I've been trying to test it under Linux...

The third release candidate is available today for the long overdue VirtualBox 5.0...

An annoying setting of Ubuntu's GRUB configuration is going to be finally addressed in Ubuntu 15.10 and will be addressed in current Ubuntu releases via a stable release update...

Firefox 39.0 is available this morning before the 4th of July weekend holiday in the US...

As a fork of pfSense, the OPNsense project that's a FreeBSD-based open-source firewall distribution did its first production-ready release this week...

Canonical confirmed today that the Intel Compute Stick preloaded with Ubuntu will go on sale next week at $110...

The first release candidate for Kodi 15 has arrived...

With the Linux 4.1 kernel having recently been released, I decided to conduct a fresh round of file-system comparisons on this new kernel using a solid-state drive. The file-systems tested in this article were the in-tree EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, F2FS, ReiserFS, and NILFS2 file-systems while a follow-up article will take a look at the out-of-tree contenders like Reiser4 and ZFS atop Linux 4.1.

At this week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee they evaluated the latest batch of proposed features for Fedora 23...

GNOME Shell and Mutter didn't see new 3.17.3 releases for last week's GNOME 3.17.3 development release, but today they've released the new package versions...

Ubuntu MATE, the spin of Ubuntu that ships with the popular fork of the GNOME 2 desktop environment, has announced a hardware partnership in shipping their distribution pre-loaded on a "free software friendly and 100% blobless Linux driver" PC...

Now being half-way through the year, here's a look back at the most popular open-source/Linux news so far this year. There's been a lot of interesting events and releases happening so far in 2015 with Phoronix having published 1,577 original news stories (an average of nine per day) and 98 Linux hardware reviews / featured-length articles...

Yet another exciting change coming with Linux 4.2 is the start of scalability improvements for FUSE, the implementation allowing for File-Systems in User-Space...

With the start of a new month comes Valve's Steam Survey results for hardware/software information of their gaming customers. Sadly, this is yet another month with the Linux usage continuing to erode...

The huge release of the open-source Blender v2.75 3D modeling software is now available for all supported platforms...

While the Linux 4.2 kernel merge window isn't yet over, AMD developers already have amassed a collection of fixes for the Radeon and AMDGPU DRM drivers following the big DRM pull...

Hot off the release of KDE Plasma 5.3.2, the KDE development community has announced the release of Applications 15.04.3...

Last month for the Phoronix 11th birthday we ran Benchmarks Of 45 Linux Systems From Atoms, Athlons and Phenoms To Xeons. This week in celebrating 200,000 benchmark results in our LinuxBenchmarking.com test lab, I ran another large comparison against the latest spectrum of hardware/software in the automated performance test lab...

The ARC architecture updates for the Linux 4.2 kernel have landed...

Libdrm 2.4.62 was released this week as a significant update to this DRM library for interfacing between the kernel DRM drivers and user-space...

After the recent article about the state of the Unity Editor's porting to Linux, the Unity team has put out a more concise post on the company's official blog...

ZFS On Linux, a native port of the ZFS file-system to the Linux kernel via out-of-tree modules, was updated last week...

OpenSSH 6.9 was released yesterday as the final step before the expected OpenSSH 7.0 release in late July...

Here are our highlights on Phoronix for the month of June...

After several delays, Qt 5.5 was officially released this morning...

Back in March there was the announcement of Fedora looking for a diversity advisor as a volunteer position to help promote diversity within this popular Linux distribution. Unfortunately it looks like their initial search didn't yield any suitable applicants so they're back to looking for more people interested in that position...

Just on the heels of his last blogpost about four years in porting KDE to Wayland, Martin Gräßlin, the long-time Kwin maintainer, has put out another blog post detailing some of the troubles that he and the KDE crew have encountered in their prepping for Wayland...

While LLVMpipe tends to be an afterthought in supporting new OpenGL extensions within Mesa/Gallium3D and is in need of some help, David Airlie managed to land some improvements for it today in Mesa by adding support for double-precision floating-points...

The latest major pull request for the Linux 4.2 kernel provides the x86 platform driver updates for this next major kernel release...

One week after the Radeon R9 Fury X launched at $649 USD with an integrated water-cooling solution, the graphics card remains in short supply and it's not clear when exactly this graphics card will better saturate retail channels. At this point, I've shifted my focused to the air-cooled AMD Radeon R9 Fury graphics card that will ship in two weeks and be air-cooled while costing $100 less...

Google engineers have added support for the Tegra X1 "T210" SoC to Coreboot. Additionally, they've added support for the "Smaug" Chromebook to Coreboot that uses this latest-generation NVIDIA Tegra 64-bit SoC...

The PC-BSD development team today announced their 10.2 pre-release, which continues to be derived from FreeBSD. Additionally they've also announced new 11.0-CURRENT images for those wishing to get a look ahead at FreeBSD/PC-BSD 11.0...

Just a few hours after writing about some new Linux video project dubbed "PulseVideo", Pinos was announced as a new initiative by Fedora Workstation for improving Linux video support...

Today we crossed the threshold of having carried out 200,000 benchmarks from our basement server farm of various Linux upstream projects (Linux kernel, GCC, Clang, Mesa, etc) and published on LinuxBenchmarking.com. As of writing this article, 203,425 benchmarks have successfully completed with a few thousand tests being carried out per day in our fully-automated test lab...

Eduardo Lima Mitev of Igalia last week published a new vec4 back-end based on NIR for the Mesa i965 DRI driver. This work is part of implementing a NIR to Vec4 pass in order to allow using NIR for everything...

It seems there's an announcement imminent concerning some sort of "PulseVideo" project that likely is the PulseAudio equivalent for video...

For Phoronix Premium visitors accessing our website today, you're now the first with access to the brand new Phoronix.com web design that's been almost entirely redesigned from scratch and supports a converged desktop/tablet/smartphone experience...