The Most Popular Linux & Open-Source News Over The Past 11 Years
If you didn't read it already, there is already my birthday message from earlier today about Phoronix.com turning 11 years old and Phoronix Test Suite turning 7 years old today. Beyond my thoughts in that message, here's a look at the most popular Phoronix articles since 5 June 2004.
Of the 15,000+ original news stories published on Phoronix, here's the most popular ones to date:
Eric S. Raymond Calls LLVM The "Superior Compiler" To GCC
Joining in on the heated discussion that originated over Richard Stallman voicing concerns over adding LLVM's LLDB debugger support to Emacs, Eric S Raymond has come out to once again voice his support in favor of LLVM/Clang and express his feelings that GCC's leading days are over.
NetworkManager Now Supports Bridging, AP-Mode Hotspot
NetworkManager 0.9.8 was released today and while being called a "new stable bugfix release" it does introduce several new features for users of this Linux networking component.
Say Hello To Linux 3.0; Linus Just Tagged 3.0-rc1
For anyone that was doubting Linus Torvalds would finally part ways with the Linux 2.6 kernel series, you lost your bets. On the eve of Memorial Day in the United States and his departure to Japan for LinuxCon, Linus Torvalds just tagged Linux 3.0-rc1 in Git.
Wine On Android Is Coming For Running Windows Apps
A port of the Wine software to Google's Android platform is being worked on.
Recapping All The Interesting Talks Of XDC2014
The XDC2014 conference officially ended on Friday and was followed on Saturday by X.Org developers drinking wine and cycling around Bordeaux, France. For those not in attendance that haven't been keeping up with all of the Phoronix articles, here's a summary.
AMD Releases 900+ Pages Of GPU Specs
Ending off the X Developer Summit this year, Matthew Tippett handed off ATI's GPU specifications to David Airlie on a CD (as reported by Daniel Stone). However, the specifications are also now available on the Internet!
Dell Wants Better ATI Linux Drivers
Dell knows it won't happen overnight, but along side wanting to ship audio/video codecs, Intel Wireless 80.211N support for Linux, Broadcom Wireless for Linux, and being able to ship notebooks and desktops with Compiz Fusion enabled, Dell would like to see improved ATI Linux drivers.
Here's The First Screenshot Of The Linux Steam Client
Less than two weeks ago we reported on the Mac OS X Steam client confirming the existence of a Linux client and then found more Linux references too. We then found the unreleased Steam Linux binaries that were under active development. Some still didn't believe the existence of a Steam client for Linux with Source Engine support, but it's something we have said for nearly two years based upon our sources and then the emergence of these binaries.
NVIDIA PR Responds To Torvalds' Harsh Words
NVIDIA's PR department has issued a statement following the harsh comments by Linus Torvalds last week where he referred to the graphics company as the single worst company they have ever dealt with, called them out on not supporting Optimus, and other issues.
Valve Pushes Out Half-Life For Linux
Valve has originally ported their original Half-Life title to Linux.
13 Reasons Linux 3.13 Is Going To Be Very Exciting
While the merge window for the Linux 3.13 kernel isn't even over yet, this next major kernel update is already looking to be rather exciting with a number of new features.
SteamOS Compositor Details, Kernel Patches, Screenshots
Here are more details on the innards of SteamOS along with some screenshots of the GNOME-based desktop environment outside of the Steam Big Picture Mode.
AMD: GPU Specifications Without NDAs!
This morning at the X Developer Summit in the United Kingdom, Matthew Tippett and John Bridgman of AMD have announced that they will be releasing their ATI GPU specifications without any Non-Disclosure Agreements needed by the developers!
A New Project To Run Mac OS X Binaries On Linux
While there is the Wine project to run native Windows binaries on Linux (and other platforms), there's a new open-source project that's emerging for running Apple OS X binaries on Linux in a seamless manner.
Raspberry Pi GPU Driver Turns Out To Be Crap
While it looked hopeful at first with today's announcement of a fully open-source graphics stack for the Broadcom VideoCore found in the popular Raspberry Pi development board, upon closer examination it's actually not that good.
Sony's PlayStation 4 Is Running Modified FreeBSD 9
The operating system at the heart of Sony's PlayStation 4 is FreeBSD 9.0.
BQ Aquaris E5 Ubuntu Phone Being Released Next Week
Beginning next week the BQ Aquaris E5 pre-loaded with Ubuntu Phone will become available in Europe.
FreeBSD 10 To Use Clang Compiler, Deprecate GCC
As indicated by the Q1-2012 FreeBSD Status Report, LLVM's Clang compiler is quickly replacing GCC for this popular BSD operating system. The developers are also making much progress in a GNU-free C++11 stack. For FreeBSD 10 they're aiming for Clang as the default C/C++ compiler, deprecate GCC, and to have a BSD-licensed C++ stack.
ATI R500/600 Driver For Solaris Coming?
While no ATI fglrx driver is available for Solaris/OpenSolaris or *BSD, now that AMD will be offering up specifications to X.Org developers and an open-source driver, it certainly is promising for any Solaris user depending upon ATI's Radeon X1000 "R500" or HD 2000 "R600" series..
Parted Magic Is Still Free
Parted Magic, the popular lightweight live Linux environment for managing hard drive partitions through GParted and Parted, looks like it's now behind a pay wall, but that's not entirely the case.
The most popular reviews / featured-length articles of the 3,000+ written by your's truly over the past 11 years include:
Real World Benchmarks Of The EXT4 File-System
With the EXT4 file-system being marked as stable in the forthcoming Linux 2.6.28 kernel, and some Linux distributions potentially switching to it as an interim step until the btrfs file-system is ready, we decided it was time to benchmark this journaled file-system for ourselves.
Mac OS X 10.5 vs. Ubuntu 8.10 Benchmarks
Last week we published Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 benchmarks from a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 and had found Ubuntu's performance degraded peculiarly over the past year and a half. We then published Fedora 7 to 10 benchmarks covering the same time-frame and from the same exact Intel notebook computer, but the newer releases of Fedora were only marginally slower in a few tests.
Intel GMA X4500HD
Earlier this month Intel had announced the GMA X4500 series, which is their latest and greatest when it comes to integrated graphics processors. These IGPs were greeted by same-day Linux support (it had actually arrived before the chipset was announced), but it's still next to impossible to find motherboards using the G43 and G45 Chipsets that bear this IGP. Fortunately, however, our friends at Super Micro have come through and we have managed to get our hands on the C2SEA.
ASUS Motherboard Ships With Embedded Linux, Web Browser
The good folks over at ASUS have sent over the P5E3 Deluxe, which is based upon Intel's new X38 Chipset and continues in the usual ASUS fashion of pushing new (and often unexpected) innovations onto the motherboard. Without spoiling the review of this motherboard that will be published shortly, the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe is one of the most innovative motherboards we have seen to date and it packs one very exciting and unusual feature.
NVIDIA GeForce 7050
The NVIDIA GeForce 6100 and 6150 integrated graphics processors have been relatively popular among Linux and Windows users. These IGPs have been common in HTPC setups with the NVIDIA driver working out well with MythTV. NVIDIA's GeForce 6100/6150 parts have also appeared in a number of desktop systems, and while these IGPs cannot really handle modern games, they have no troubles with Beryl or Compiz.
NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT 256MB
The GeForce 8500GT is NVIDIA's value-priced contender in the GeForce 8 series. The 8500GT has a 450MHz core clock and 400MHz memory clock, but how is this $100 creation able to compete against other graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA? We have our hands on the passively-cooled Gigabyte GeForce 8500GT 256MB graphics card and have run our usual Linux graphics tests along with some of our first overclocking attempts with this new solution. Without further ado, we present the world's first Linux benchmarks of the NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT.
Touring Chernobyl In 2010
I just returned to the United States after being in Ukraine the past five days over Easter weekend. The purpose of this trip was to explore the site of the Chernobyl nuclear accident and surrounding areas -- Kyiv, Pripyat, the Red Forest, etc. Contrary to some initial beliefs, it was not an April Fools' Joke. Due to the great interest in Chernobyl among those interested in science and technology whether it be due to the fascination with nuclear power or finding Chernobyl popularized by video games, documentaries, and the like, I have published my collection of these photographs of Chernobyl showing what the area looks like in 2010 -- just days prior to the 24th anniversary of this catastrophic disaster -- along with some of my thoughts and information collected from this journey.
Is Windows 7 Actually Faster Than Ubuntu 10.04?
While Linux has long been talked about as being a faster operating system than Microsoft Windows, in 2010 is this still the case? It seems every time we deliver new benchmarks of the EXT4 file-system it's actually getting slower, recent Linux kernel releases have not been delivering any major performance enhancements for desktop users, the open-source Linux graphics drivers are still no match to the proprietary drivers...
ATI Radeon HD 3650 512MB
Last week AMD introduced the ATI Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 series, which are the new low-end graphics processors compared to the Radeon HD 3800 series. These budget graphics cards are branded as the Radeon HD 3450, 3470, and 3650 and are all available for under $100 USD. While they may be cheap, they are the first graphics cards to introduce support for DisplayPort.
Ubuntu vs. OpenSolaris vs. FreeBSD Benchmarks
Over the past few weeks we have been providing several in-depth articles looking at the performance of Ubuntu Linux. We had begun by providing Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 benchmarks and had found the performance of this popular Linux distribution to become slower with time and that article was followed up with Mac OS X 10.5 vs. Ubuntu 8.10 benchmarks and other articles looking at the state of Ubuntu's performance. In this article, we are now comparing the 64-bit performance of Ubuntu 8.10 against the latest test releases of OpenSolaris 2008.11 and FreeBSD 7.1.
EXT4 File-System Tuning Benchmarks
Following last month's Btrfs file-system tuning benchmarks, in this article are a similar set of tests when stressing the EXT4 file-system with its various performance-related mount options. Here are a number of EXT4 benchmarks from Ubuntu 12.10 with different mount option configurations.
FreeBSD 8.0 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks
Canonical will be releasing Ubuntu 9.10 at the end of next month while the final release of FreeBSD 8.0 is also expected within the next few weeks. With these two popular free software operating systems both having major updates coming out at around the same time, we decided it warranted some early benchmarking as we see how the FreeBSD 8.0 and Ubuntu 9.10 performance compares.
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