Phoronix

For any students reading Phoronix interested in contributing to open-source projects, it's time to apply for Google's Summer of Code 2015 (GSoC 2015) where you can be financed to work on major free software initiatives over the summer holiday...

As part of the latest round of GNOME's Women Outreach Program, usability issues with GNOME were analyzed...

Just days after NVIDIA released the VDPAU 1.0 library for Linux GPU-based video decoding support with H.265/HEVC added, libvdpau 1.1 was released to fix-up the support for this new video format...

Yesterday I wrote a bit about the 2U server chassis I've been using that cost just $69 USD a piece. Meanwhile for fitting standard ATX motherboards and larger full-size graphics cards, there's a 4U chassis I've bought several of thus far that retails for just over $50.

It looks like AMD's next-generation Radeon R9 390X graphics card could end up retailing for $700+ USD, well more than the Radeon R9 290X and NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980...

Intel's open-source Linux development crew continues working on next-generation Skylake hardware support in a steadfast manner...

Enlightenment's Evas GL component of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) now has support for exposing applications to OpenGL ES 3.0 support through Evas GL...

Marek Olšák of AMD has landed a number of improvements into mainline Mesa for the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source graphics driver for benefiting Radeon HD 7000 series graphics processors and newer...

Version 0.11 of POCL -- originally known as Portable OpenCL and since renamed to the Portable Computing Language -- is now available for running OpenCL on the CPU in an open-source environment...

David Airlie at Red Hat continues to be working on Virgil3D for providing 3D/OpenGL acceleration to KVM/QEMU guests...

Many Linux gamers have been looking forward to Divinity: Original Sin, a single-player and cooperative multiplayer fantasy RPG that was released for Windows and OS X in 2014. For those wondering about the state of its native Linux release, here's an update from the developers...

Rob Clark has managed to rid the Freedreno Gallium3D graphics driver of its old shader compiler back-end...

The fourth weekly release candidate to the Linux 4.0 kernel was just released for the newest round of Linux kernel testing...

For those in need of a 2U server chassis to handle micro-ATX/mini-ITX motherboards, the Rosewill RSV-Z2600 rackmount server chassis is the best deal I've found thus far and am happy with them after purchasing several for use in the new server farm.

With next month's release of Ubuntu 15.04, CPU microcode updates will attempted to be better handled...

While most modern Linux video acceleration is done via VDPAU or VA-API, if you're still using XvMC for MPEG-2 acceleration, a new version of this X11 library is now available...

In the process of building our new open-source, Linux benchmarking test farm the server racks I settled for are the StarTech.com 42U rack cabinets. I've bought three of these StarTech.com 42U (4POSTRACK42) racks in the past few weeks and have been happy with their quality for low-price and it includes casters, levelers, and cable management hooks.

The FreeBSD kernel finally has support for USB-based DisplayLink graphics adapters...

The eighteenth alpha release of 0 A.D. is now available for this impressive open-source ancient warfare game...

A new development version of the Arch-based Manjaro 0.9 Linux distribution is now available for testing. This release has all of the latest stable Xfce 4.12 packages available...

Not to be confused with the X (X11/X.Org) Server, Egosoft's X Rebirth is now publicly available in alpha form for Linux gamers...

Given this week's release of HHVM 3.6 I decided to run some new performance comparison tests of PHP vs. HHVM...

With the recent launch of the Raspberry Pi 2, I had immediately ordered one for some ARM hacking, as the price-performance angle was finally acceptable. Then it hit me, I had no idle screens with HDMI/DVI input.

For X.Org Foundation members that haven't yet noticed, the 2015 X.Org elections are running behind schedule. Besides electing new board members, this year's elections are particularly important due to voting for the X.Org Foundation 501(c)3 organization to be dissolved to become part of SPI...

Qualcomm announced the DragonBoard 410c yesterday as their first design in compliance with Linaro's 96Boards standard. The DragonBoard 410c will be available to developers this summer and be powered by Qualcomm's 64-bit Snapdragon SoC...

X.Org Server 1.17 has made it into Ubuntu 15.04...

ChaosEsqueAnthology is an open-source first person shooter game I hadn't heard about until a Phoronix reader contacted me this week to talk about the new release. ChaosEsqueAnthology is a fork of Xonotic (in turn forked from Nexuiz) with an interesting spin on the game...

Over the night I wrote about GTK+ 3.x support being improved inside LibreOffice after noticing the relevant Git commits while now the Red Hat developer has come forward and elaborated on his work to improve the GTK-related code within LibreOffice...

The latest game to make it over to Linux is Age of Wonders III. We've known for a while the game was being ported to Linux while now it's finally in open beta via Steam...

Days after Gitorious got acquired by GitLab, the latest code hosting platform seeing a shake-up is Google Code. Google has announced today they're shutting down Google Code...

Google announced today the release of the Chrome 42 Beta web-browser build...

Last year I wrote about a major performance breakthrough discovered for Intel's Linux graphics driver. That small but important patch for benefiting Intel Haswell graphics performance will be found with the upcoming Linux 4.0 kernel release...

Beyond posting their OpenCL 2.1 technical overview session to YouTube, the Khronos Group has now uploaded their Vulkan and SPIR-V question and answer session too for those wishing to learn more about this new graphics API and graphics/compute intermediate representation...

Foreign LINUX is a new open-source project serving as a dynamic binary translator and Linux system call interface emulator. Foreign LINUX is designed to allow unmodified Linux binaries to run on Windows without any system changes or special drivers...

For full OpenMP support in LLVM/Clang that's hoped for Clang 3.7 after some OpenMP pragmas made it in for LLVM Clang 3.6. It looks like the 3.7 release will indeed deliver better OMP support with more functionality having been implemented in recent days...

While there's 1000+ Steam games on Linux and the Linux desktop experience improving greatly with GNOME 3.14/3.16 and KDE Plasma 5, for Windows users not everyone feels the Linux desktop is ready...

LunarG, the company that's been doing a lot of consulting work for Valve on optimizing Linux graphics drivers, is also the company that Valve paid to develop the Intel Vulkan Linux graphics driver. LunarG has been doing Linux graphics driver development for years with Mesa/Gallium3D and was formed by some of the same former Tungsten Graphics staff. Here's some more information on their Vulkan and SPIR-V adventures...

When recently covering how Kubuntu 15.04 is turning out quite well and a nice way to enjoy the latest KDE Plasma 5 experience, several Phoronix readers had commented about the "ugly" wallpaper. Well, now here's your chance to improve the situation...

For what it's worth, it seems the GTK+ 3.x support for LibreOffice is finally becoming "usable" thanks to a Red Hat developer...

For those wishing to learn more about the OpenCL 2.1 specification unveiled last week by The Khronos Group at GDC15 alongside Vulkan and SPIR-V, their presentation is now public...

Time sure seems to fly by: OpenGL 4.0 turned five years old today. The sad part is that Mesa still doesn't fully implement the GL 4.0 specification...

Facebook developers announced the release today of HHVM 3.6.0, the HipHop Virtual Machine that's at the heart of their Hack programming language and also serving as a popular PHP alternate implementation thanks to its high performance...

Google has finally unveiled a new Chromebook Pixel! This high-end Chromebook starts at $999 USD and packs an Intel Core "Broadwell" processor with a HiDPI screen and up to 12 hours of battery life...

Early adopters of Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet can now use AMD's new Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver that's been packaged for Ubuntu and uploaded to the Vivid repository prior to its release on AMD.com...

Google is going to be open-sourcing SageTV, the proprietary DVR/HTPC software Google acquired back in 2011...

The fifth development release of Phoronix Test Suite 5.6 is now available for testing prior to officially releasing Phoronix Test Suite 5.6.0 in the days ahead...

Last week during Valve's SteamOS / Linux game sale that happened during the Game Developers' Conference, a number of new Linux games were confirmed. We now know who is working on porting some of these new titles over to Linux...

There's now more than one thousand native games available via Steam for Linux / SteamOS...

Next week is NVIDIA's annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) taking place in San Jose, California...

The official wallpaper of the upcoming Ubuntu 15.04 release was announced this morning...