Phoronix

Last week I covered the new GNOME project of Nuntius, an effort to send tablet/smart-phone Android notifications to the GNOME desktop. There was a fair amount of interest in Nuntius, including many forum goers asking why they didn't use KDE-Connect, among other questions. Those questions have now been addressed...

Libinput v0.12 was released over the night by Peter Hutterer as the last planned release of this input handling library to break the API/ABI. Libinput is on its path to version 1.0 for providing input handling on Wayland-based systems, X.Org (via the xf86-input-libinput driver), and other environments wishing to standardize their input handling...

Released this past week was Chrome OS 41 and besides having improved WiFi stability, updates to the guest mode wallpaper, and other changes, some Chrome OS devices have been updated to Google's new "Freon" graphics stack. Freon further removes X11 dependencies from Google's world and will yield performance improvements in the future. Freon isn't based directly on Wayland nor Mir...

There's still a lot of work ahead in finishing up the new server room / test farm, but some of the systems have been restored in the new rackmount environment and proceeding with their daily (and in some cases per-commit) open-source Linux benchmarking in a fully-automated and standardized fashion...

Linus Torvalds put out the Linux 4.0-rc3 release a short time ago as an "entirely normal" update for this stage of the kernel's release process of Linux 4.0...

With the Linux 4.0 kernel getting into shape here are some early benchmarks of three AMD Radeon graphics cards when comparing the Linux 4.0 Git performance to that of the Linux 3.19 stable kernel.

How do you think the community-based game engine projects like ioquake3 will evolve now that Unreal Engine 4, Source 2 Engine, and Unity 5 are "free" for use by game developers?..

Ravi is a new open-source project that's an experimental dialect/derivative of Lua using LLVM for JIT compilation...

This past week as part of Epic Games making UE4 free to developers they managed to get NVIDIA to let them open up some of the PhysX source code as PhysX is depended upon by Unreal Engine 4 for physics handling. NVIDIA this past week ultimately opened up their entire PhysX SDK to everyone...

Those using the bleeding-edge version of Google's Chrome/Chromium web-browser are discovering you need to be using a relatively new version of the Linux kernel to avoid issues...

Following Friday's release of Wine 1.7.38 is the new Wine-Staging build based upon this release but with various experimental functionality added in. As usual, this Wine-Staging update is another exciting feature release...

There's yet another conversation taking place within the GCC camp about modularizing the GNU Compiler Collection...

It's been several weeks since last publishing any Mesa/LLVM Git benchmarks with AMD Radeon graphics cards so for this weekend article are some fresh OpenGL graphics performance tests when running with Mesa 10.6-devel Git and LLVM 3.7 SVN atop the stable Linux 3.19 kernel.

FFmpeg 2.6 is available this weekend and the new release brings a large number of new features...

Intel has published a patch-set adding support for Intel's Trace Hub to the Linux kernel for carrying out full system debugging...

A Gentoo developer has raised concerns over bad licensing and attribution by ChromiumOS and CoreOS for their copies of Gentoo ebuilds...

The latest addition to KDE Applications 15.04 after Kdenlive was added is KDE Telepathy...

Emil Velikov announced the much anticipated release of Mesa 10.5 this evening, which is the quarterly update to this open-source (primarily Linux) user-space graphics stack...

Just one week after Intel sent in their initial DRM driver updates for Linux 4.1, a second pull request has been submitted with more DRM graphics driver changes queued up for Linux 4.1...

Fedora 22 is shaping up well for boasting many new features while also making it out on time... While it looked like Fedora 22 Alpha might be delayed, the developers managed to get the blocker issues taken care of and today decided they're ready to release F22 Alpha on time next week Tuesday...

KDE developer David Edmundson has made some more progress with improving the high DPI display experience with KDE applications...

Qualcomm's Innovation Center continues contributing to the open-source MDP DRM driver that started out as a reverse-engineered display driver for Qualcomm's ARM SoCs via Rob Clark as part of the Freedreno project...

With all of the GDC2015 announcements this week from Valve developing an Intel Vulkan Linux graphics driver to confirming a lot of new Linux games, I just noticed today that Valve published their Steam Survey results for February and it shows a decline in Linux gamers...

Announced last month was the HiKey 8-core 64-bit ARM development board being based upon the HiSilicon Cortex-A53 SoC. This HiKey board came out of 96Boards as the first certified board by the Linaro Community Board Group. I happen to have some early benchmarks of this eight-core AArch64 development board running Linaro/Debian...

Wine 1.7.38 was released this morning as the newest bi-weekly development release of this popular Linux and OS X program for running Windows programs...

While you probably don't have a Siemens motherboard underneath your desk, the company has committed support for another one of their motherboards to Coreboot...

The latest GNOME application to speak of that's entered development is Nuntius, a program to show your Android phone/tablet notifications directly on the GNOME desktop as part of its notification system...

For those wishing to learn more about The Khronos Group's work on Vulkan, SPIR-V, and OpenCL 2.1, their presentations and videos are now available...

For helping out ISVs and game developers test out their initial Vulkan code, they developed their own Intel Vulkan GPU graphics driver for Linux that they intend to open-source...

Valve has started showing off the Steam Controller and the many different Steam Machines within the Steam Store...

The Software Freedom Conservancy has today announced a lawsuit against VMware for failing to comply with the GPL on Linux...

This week Ubuntu Cloud switched over to systemd while on Monday is when all other Ubuntu flavors will be migrating to systemd by default over Upstart...

GLAVE is a debug tool that LunarG has been working on to help in debugging the new Vulkan API...

A brand new networking stack is seeking to be merged into the mainline Linux kernel that's been under development for the past few years. Hello, Linux XIA...

David Airlie has started pulling in fresh Git code into DRM-Next for merging eventually with the Linux 4.1 kernel...

openSUSE Tumbleweed, the rolling-release version of the popular German Linux distribution, is keeping up well with all of the innovations in the free software ecosystem...

For those interested in the new SPIR-V specification for the intermediate representation used by Vulkan and OpenCL 2.1, a developer has already written an open-source reader and writer of SPIR-V...

For those in need of a new open-source music player, Foobnix is GPLv3-licensed, written in Python, and with its newest release has been ported to using the GTK3 tool-kit...

LunarG, the consulting company around open-source Linux graphics drivers, is one of the organizations involved heavily with the new Vulkan graphics API and SPIR-V intermediate representation. Thanks to their involvement, they already have out an initial SPIR-V front-end to their open-source LunarGLASS Mesa project...

Here's another update on the construction of the new Linux benchmarking test farm...

Besides releasing Mutter 3.15.91 on Wednesday, Florian Müllner also released an updated version of GNOME Shell for the imminent GNOME 3.15.91 release...

Samba 4.2.0 was just released for those in need of file and print service sharing with Windows via SMB/CIFS. The Samba 4.2 release brings with it several new features...

Florian Müllner released the latest GNOME Mutter window manager update in the road to this month's GNOME 3.16 debut. In particular, today's Mutter 3.15.91 release has some prominent Wayland fixes...

NVIDIA has decided to open up some of their CPU-based implementation of PhysX 3.3 with clothing and destruction libraries...

Interested individuals are already discussing the prospects of dealing with SPIR-V intermediate representation for the new Vulkan graphics API within the GNU Compiler Collection...

The PC-BSD developers have shared some of the upcoming features for their next release, PC-BSD 10.1.2. While it's just a point release on top of FreeBSD, PC-BSD continues adding a lot of interesting, desktop-oriented innovations to their BSD distribution...

Making GDC2015 week even more exciting for Linux gamers on top of the Source 2 Engine, the Steam Link streaming device, and Steam Machines shipping this year is a big SteamOS game sale via Steam. This sale is selling not only existing Linux/SteamOS game ports but also several AAA games being ported to Linux...

For student developers looking to do some summer coding, the list of accepted organizations for Google's 2015 Summer of Code initiative has been published...

As of last night, the Ubuntu 15.04 Cloud daily ISOs have switched to booting with systemd by default rather than Upstart...

Our friends at Ubuntu PC vendor System76 yesterday revealed their Meerkat Ubuntu desktop system...