http://www.phoronix.com/ GNU/Linux and Solaris news from Phoronix en-us http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1Mjg http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1Mjg Clive Crous, the new CEO of Linux Game Publishing following the resignation of founder and CEO Michael Simms, has issued a message to Linux gamers concerning the future of LGP. The key items brought up in the message by the new Linux Game Publishing CEO are listed below while the message in full can be read via this copy in the forums. - Michael Simms will still be involved with Linux Game Publishing in an advisory capacity and in porting some titles over to Linux. - Clive Crous sees strong potential in digital distribution channels (e.g. Desura and Steam) and will be focusing much effort in these digital areas for future LGP-ported titles. - Linux Game Publishing acknowledges it's had a hard time fulfilling orders of physical CD/DVDs and doing so on-time. Sat, 04 Feb 2012 09:46:08 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1Mjc http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1Mjc Sparked from a posting earlier this week about Compiz likely being dropped from Fedora 17, some are wondering whether Compiz is effectively dead. It's been brought up in the forums about the state of upstream Compiz developments. Some Phoronix readers go as far as calling upstream Compiz being dead. Sat, 04 Feb 2012 07:33:12 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MjY http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MjY Jerome Glisse, the Red Hat developer commonly working on the open-source Radeon graphics driver, has announced that he believes the R600 Gallium3D tiling support is complete. In early January was when Jerome published new R600-class 2D color tiling patches that support from the original Radeon HD 2000 series through the Radeon HD 6900 series. The R600 2D color tiling support is designed to deliver major performance boosts when it works correctly, but the initial support published last month was rather buggy. Sat, 04 Feb 2012 05:18:52 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MjU http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MjU Along with the discussion around a rolling-release version of Fedora Linux, having been discussed recently has been the possibility of providing Ubuntu's Unity desktop as an alternative desktop environment for Fedora. This is obviously a topic that gets some riled up. The discussion about Unity desktop packages as a possibility for Fedora has basically died since there's no Fedora package maintainers interested in doing the legwork at this point and most importantly is that Unity doesn't take advantage of many of the upstream GNOME APIs. Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:19:10 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MjQ http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MjQ For open-source fans, here's the first shots of Limare running, in advance of the official announcement this weekend. Limare is the open-source program (the code will be dropped by early next week) that was designed to assist in reverse-engineering the ARM Mali 200/400 graphics processors. It's a simple program, similar to reNouveau or the r600demo back in the day, for drawing simple objects to the screen. But first of all, if you didn't read the Phoronix exclusive by now, this weekend at FOSDEM in Brussels there will be the announcement of an open-source reverse-engineered ARM Mali graphics driver for Linux / Android. Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:52:43 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MjM http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MjM This weekend in Brussels at FOSDEM along with many interesting X.Org discussions and laying out the plans for Wayland 1.0, the Coreboot project has an exciting announcement: showing off the first mainstream laptop with Coreboot support. This open-source BIOS re-implementation project will be showing off a laptop running Coreboot. This has been known as part of the talk's abstract and then an interview published this week with Carl-Daniel Hailfinger. Fri, 03 Feb 2012 08:47:24 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MjI http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MjI While Fedora 17 has a massive amount of features to look forward to, updates to Compiz is likely not on the agenda. In the coming days, Compiz and its related packages for this compositing window manager are likely to be removed from the Fedora 17 package-list. Compiz is on the list of packages that are set to be "retired" from Fedora. Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:56:58 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MjE http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MjE A Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:37:58 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MjA http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MjA Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" Alpha 2 is now available for testing. This second development release incorporates many package updates and other changes to this next Ubuntu Long-Term Support release. Kate Stewart of Canonical announced Precise Pangolin Alpha 2 in this mailing list message. Fri, 03 Feb 2012 02:41:04 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTk http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTk There's now a GStreamer plug-in to utilize OpenCL within this popular Linux video framework so that an OpenCL kernel can be applied against a video stream. Fabian Deutsch wrote the OpenCL support for GStreamer and has made it available as gst-plugins-cl. This support allows for an OpenCL kernel to be run against a video stream in the GStreamer pipeline. Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:57:16 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTg http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTg The other Wayland-related news yesterday besides the surprise announcement that the Wayland 1.0 stable release is approaching was the first-shot attempt at "weston-launch", an easy launcher for the demo Weston compositor. The weston-launch component created by Benjamin Franzke is meant to make it very easy to launch Weston, the demo/reference compositor for Wayland. Running weston-launch will launch Weston, provides a mechanism for Weston to set/drop the DRM master, open a TTY, and read input devices without being the root user. A launcher for Weston was one of the major TODO list items noted recently by Tiago Vignatti, who is part of the Wayland team at Intel. This medium-complexity item was described by Tiago as: Weston is meant to run as a normal user. Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:10:18 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTc http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTc Many were talking yesterday about why the forthcoming $25/$35 Raspberry Pi system won't ship in kit form, but of more interest to Phoronix readers out of that blog post would be the details concerning their Linux graphics driver stack and what they will be supporting. The Raspberry Pi, which is based on a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, has a VideoCore IV GPU paired with its ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor. Here are a few details about the expected graphics software stack configuration: - OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenVG, EGL, and OpenMAX IL will be the core APIs supported by their GPU libraries on the Raspberry Pi. Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:38:41 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTY http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTY While id Software may have recently lost its main Linux game developer (Timothee Bessett), they haven't abandoned their open-source ways. This afternoon John Carmack had an interesting tweet. John Carmack, the well-known co-founder of id Software and a fan of open-source and Linux, had to say on Twitter, "All of the Id open source releases are now on github: github.com/id-Software" It doesn't look like id Software has dropped (or otherwise revised) any new major code, but rather they have consolidated all of their open-source efforts on GitHub. Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:39:49 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTU http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTU The second Linux 3.3 kernel release candidate is now available, which is coming a bit late due to Linus Torvalds falling behind. Fortunately Linux 3.3-rc2 wasn't delayed for technical reasons, but just a "mind-fart" by Linus. "Ok, so for no real reason at all - except me being disorganized and just not thinking about it - rc2 is several days delayed. Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:12:00 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTQ http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTQ This weekend at FOSDEM 2012 what Kristian Høgsberg is expected to say in Brussels will surprise many of you: Wayland 1.0 is gearing up for release as their first -- stable -- release. Wayland is supposed to be ready to take on the Linux desktop world. The Wayland Display Server has made immense progress since the time when I broke news of the project to the world back in late 2008. Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:55:35 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTM http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTM Besides the Linux Game Publishing shake-up, there's more Linux gaming news to report today: there's a new Humble Indie Bundle. Besides being the usual spiel of being a collection of DRM-free cross-platform games, Android mobile support was added to all of the available games. The games that comprise "The Humble Bundle for Android" are Anomaly, Osmos, and EDGE. Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:59:03 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTI http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTI AMD released the Radeon HD 7950 today as the second "Southern Islands" graphics card following the release of the Radeon HD 7970 one month ago, but how is the Linux support for the new AMD Radeon GPUs? First of all, the AMD Radeon HD 7950 graphics card packs 1792 Stream processors, 112 texture units, 32 ROPs, 800MHz core clock, 1.25GHz memory clock, abd 3GB of GDDR5 memory on a 384-bit bus. This graphics card with 4.31 billion transistors has a power limit of 200 Watts and like the Radeon HD 7970 it's core is manufactured on a 28nm TSMC process. Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:17:18 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTE http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTE There's some news today out of Linux Game Publishing, but it's not about a new game being ported to Linux. Rather, it's an apology from Michael Simms, the CEO of LGP, and to announce his resignation. Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:14:38 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTA http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTA Marek Olšák, the well-known independent contributor to Mesa that's made a great deal of enhancements to the Radeon driver stack over the past few years, has a new patch-set. The latest patch-set he published last night cleans up the R600g driver and reworks its cache flushing code. Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:41:42 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MDk http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MDk The FreeBSD project has published their quarterly report outlining some of the advancements made by this leading BSD operating system in the last quarter of 2011. A lot of progress was made, but still there's some work left to be accomplished. Among the advancements that were noted by FreeBSD in Q4'2011 include: - The libc++ library (providing a C++11 STL implementation) and libcxxrt (implementation of the C++ ABI) were introduced to the BSD-licensed C++ stack. Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:28:39 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MDg http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MDg At this week's Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, another round of features were approved for the Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle) release. The last few Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) have seen a large number of features being approved for this next Fedora Linux release due out in May. This Monday's meeting wasn't any different with many more features being officially approved for this next Red-Hat-sponsored distribution. Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:33:53 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MDc http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MDc If you haven't tried out the Wayland Display Server as of late, after there being a stream of new announcements, you probably should or at least check out the videos in this posting. The Wayland Display Server is becoming more lively and slowly reaching a point where it may be possible for some to use it on a day-to-day basis. The most recent Wayland announcement came this weekend on Phoronix when Wayland gained support for surface transformations. Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:53:09 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MDY http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MDY Google's 2011 Code-In, which is a winter program similar to their Summer of Code, ended earlier this month with many contributions to some leading open-source projects. While not as popular as Google Summer of Code, Google Code-In is an eight-week program that takes place each winter where Google organizes pre-university students to help out on various open-source projects. This year there were over 500 students working on 18 open-source projects for a period of up to eight weeks. With the younger developer status and shorter contributions during the winter, the outcomes aren't generally as exciting as GSoC, which sometimes brings new state trackers, broken ambitions, and some interesting features, among other novel ideas. Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:33:52 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MDU http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MDU There's emerging support within the DirectFB project for running atop Google's Android platform. When checking whether or not DirectFB 1.6 is released yet with its many new features, which was slated to happen in January, I discovered some interesting activity within the main Git repository for this lightweight graphics acceleration (and input, among other features) library. Landing in the DirectFB code-base in the past two weeks since last writing about the project has been early-stage Android support. For Android 2.3.3 and later, there is now early DirectFB support with a default window manager, GLES2 graphics driver, and support for EGL context creation. Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:03:47 CST http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MDQ http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MDQ A new ARM-based tablet computer has been announced and it will be shipping KDE's Plasma Active as its default tablet UI experience. Aaron Seigo mentioned the first tablet shipping with Plasma Active pre-installed via his blog. This tablet is called "Spark" and its price-point is only €200 while being fully unlocked and using Plasma Active by default. Sun, 29 Jan 2012 07:23:41 CST