Hardware News Archives

Reports are coming out that Samsung for the past few years has been working on its own original graphics processor design.

Compared to most Linux PC vendors targeting consumers that are just selling re-branded white box systems with Linux preloaded, CompuLab continues to have an interesting set of original offerings that are Linux-friendly and built really well. The latest system we've had the pleasure of trying out is the Intense-PC2.

The first digital cinema camera comprised of open-source software and open hardware is closer to becoming reality.

Matrox is out with new professional graphics cards in their new C-Series product line-up. These new graphics cards designed for driving multiple displays -- including a quad-output fan-less graphics card -- will be supported under Linux.

The Free Software Foundation and Debian have hooked up to help free software users in the search for finding Linux compatible hardware... In a different approach from the other Linux compatibility lists and hardware databases, they are only promoting hardware that doesn't require any proprietary software or firmware.

While not directly tech related, a great desk accessory I recently picked up is the Ensign Group Scrap-Ma-Bob Cup and Bag Clamp-On Holder.

While most if not all of the modern motherboards produced by MSI allow BIOS/UEFI updating to happen from within the BIOS setup utility and done using a USB flash drive -- as is also the case with most other motherboard vendors -- for Linux users the updating can be a bit more of a headache for MSI motherboards.

This holiday weekend (in the US) can be a great time to test your Linux system to see how it's performing against the latest AMD and Intel processors to see if it's time for a good upgrade.

To compete with the growing number of single-board development computers in the ARM space and even in the x86 space, Imagination Technologies has introduced their first public MIPS single-board computer for developers. While it won't likely see the success of the Raspberry Pi, it's an interesting piece of hardware to say the least and hopefully we'll be able to benchmark it at Phoronix.

The x86 platform driver updates were sent in on Saturday by Matthew Garrett and besides some clean-ups and various quirks / minor additions for new devices, there's a new driver for generating falling laptop events for Toshiba laptops.

While Linux kernel developers have already been working on ACPI 5.1 support since it brings ACPI on ARM, and there's partial support in the Linux 3.17 kernel, the UEFI Forum today finally announced the official release of the ACPI 5.1 specification.

Acer has introduced its newest Chromebook today and it's powered by the mighty powerful Tegra K1 SoC.

Raspberry Pi fans can rejoice that the VC4 Gallium3D driver has been merged to mainline Mesa in its early form.

The input subsystem pull request has been submitted for the Linux 3.17 merge window.

Separate from the new DRM driver to be found in Linux 3.17 that was written about earlier, there's another new DRM driver published this week that has yet to hit the mainline Linux kernel.

LowRISC is a new venture that's "open to the core" with a goal of producing fully open hardware systems.

The HID (Human Interface Device) pull request was sent in this morning for the Linux 3.17 merge window.

The GPLGPU is now available, a GPLv3-licensed Verilog design for a 2D/3D graphics engine.

Belkin revived the Linksys WRT54G in a new 802.11ac model earlier this year and one of its selling points has been the OpenWRT support as what made the WRT54G legendary. However, OpenWRT developers and fans are yet to be satisfied by this new router.

One month ago Linux developer Eric Anholt left Intel to work at Broadcom. Eric, a long-time contributor to the open-source Linux graphics stack, is now tasked at Broadcom with developing a DRM driver and Mesa/Gallium3D driver for Broadcom's "VC4" graphics hardware, which is found within the Raspberry Pi.

Michael Mozrek gave a presentation recently about his work as the project lead on the DragonBox Pyra, the slated replacement to the Open Pandora handheld Linux game system.

The company behind MicroXwin, a kernel-based X Windows implementation that claims to be the smallest and fastest X implementation, has come up with a unified Linux distribution that runs Android and Debian/Ubuntu applications simultaneously.

While more computer peripheral companies are paying attention to Linux -- especially gaming device related manufacturers -- in the age of Linux-based Steam Machines and SteamOS, not all are completely on-board quite yet. Logitech has shown some signs of Linux interest and support in the past, but they aren't yet committing to providing Linux support for all of their products.

A new update to the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) is finally available.

Developers have put out their latest batch of Allwinner patches that allow for basic upstream kernel support of Allwinner's A23 SoC.

A few days ago I wrote about Codethink getting Wayland/Weston running on NVIDIA's Jetson TK1 Tegra K1 development board using a fully open driver stack. Codethink's work is now available in both code and image form.

Here's a look at the rest of the articles coming up on Phoronix this month with pursuing the mission of enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the leading source for Linux benchmarks and hardware/enthusiast-oriented information.

Codethink has been playing with NVIDIA's very interesting Jetson TK1 ARM development board that pairs a quad-core Cortex-A15 (plus fifth companion core) with a Kepler-based graphics processor. In little work they've managed to get Wayland running on the NVIDIA device along with using the latest stable Linux kernel.

The MIPS architecture pull for the Linux 3.16 merge window pull is full of prominent changes for this next kernel version.

As I've expressed on Twitter and in a past article I've run into some tough times recently with the ASUS Zenbook UX301LAA ultrabook under Linux. ASUS wasn't of much help and after further system reboots, the issue appears to be heat-related with this Intel Haswell ultrabook.

VESA has released the DockPort standard today from Computex that's an extension of the DisplayPort interface and allows for USB data and power charging capabilities as a royalty-free, industry standard.

With Computex Taipei happening this week and the Tizen Developer Conference starting tomorrow in San Francisco, Samsung has finally announced their first Tizen smartphone. The Samsung Z is this forthcoming Tizen phone.

The design files to the Pandora Linux gaming handheld computer is now open-sourced for non-commercial use.

This morning I shared the list of the 60+ graphics cards being tested under Linux for a set of very interesting articles coming up in the days ahead in this massive Linux graphics comparison in celebration of Phoronix.com's 10th birthday next week. While all of the graphics cards were tried, with the open-source drivers there were notable failures with both the AMD Radeon and Nouveau drivers.

There's some very interesting tests that will be published on Phoronix in the next few days... Including the results from testing 65 different graphics cards under Linux with varying software stacks.

As many Phoronix readers will recall, I switched from a Retina MacBook Pro to an ASUS Zenbook Prime ultrabook. After overcoming some issues, the setup was nice, but I'm already having some regrets and issues.

Complementing BCache, Flashcache, and DM-Cache, the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) has another new cache method for Linux systems.

The Neo900 project remains an effort to provide a motherboard replacement for the once-popular Nokia N900 smart-phone while carrying on the tradition of the OpenMoko project.

After writing recently about the PowerTOP 2.6 release and mentioning that some new power consumption/efficiency tests were in the works at Phoronix, a few readers wrote in asking about other ways to extend their battery life under Linux.

While open-source activities around Intel, AMD Radeon, and NVIDIA (Nouveau) hardware continues to flourish, for the unlucky users still dependent upon VIA x86 hardware, the OpenChrome and VIA kernel mode-setting initiatives seem to have come to a standstill.

For many weeks now David Airlie at Red Hat has been working on DisplayPort MST (Multi-Stream Transport) for the open-source Linux graphics stack while this code is now getting into shape.

Linux kernel developer Matthew Garrett is out with a new blog post to end out the weekend. This latest post isn't about Linux UEFI problems or the like, but his observations from the OpenStack Summit about the most popular laptop vendor being Apple even though OpenStack is mostly about Linux deployments...

One of the newest laptops out of System76, the well known hardware vendor in Linux circles for their Ubuntu support, is the latest version of their Bonobo Extreme. While the laptop weighs 8.6 lbs / 3.9 kg, it does aim to offer extreme Linux performance.

The VESA association has added "Adaptive-Sync" to the DisplayPort 1.2a video interface specification. Adaptive-Sync is a vendor-neutral way of having a dynamic/adaptive refresh-rate and similar to NVIDIA's G-Sync.

In June we should start seeing the Allwinner A80-based hardware designs hitting the market for a much needed performance boost for Allwinner SoCs.

The work by David Airlie of Red Hat's DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport is beginning to show success.

Clpeak is a relatively new open-source tool for querying the peak capabilities of OpenCL devices under Linux.

A new update was recently released for Jolla's Sailfish OS for running on Google's Nexus 4 smart-phone.

Those in need of an affordable external DVD writer that's USB 2.0 based and will work with Linux, Amazon has a simple yet reliable and Linux-friendly slim external DVD burner that doesn't cost too much.

For those that may be looking for a PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet adapter, the TP-LINK TG-3468 is a suitable choice and costs just $12 USD and runs well with Linux.