Latest Featured Content

July 03, 2009 -- Recently on our forums, Frank Earl (who goes by the synonym Svartalf), has been seeking the input of Linux gamers as to what games they would like to see ported to Linux. Frank has been working for Linux Game Publishing for a few years porting various titles to Linux and has done work independently on bringing new software from Windows to Linux. Frank was overwhelmed by the response on our forums and it has even led to new Linux games with many other possible ports being looked into. To get his view as where Linux gaming is currently at, he has answered a few of our questions about Linux game porting, Linux gaming in general, and other questions that may be of interest to gamers and Linux enthusiasts.

July 01, 2009 -- Razer has long been known as a manufacturer of high-end gaming mice with such prestigious products as the Copperhead, DeathAdder, and most recently the Lachesis. Razer has also expanded to offer other products such as the Barracuda Sound Card, Tarantula Keyboard, and the Piranha Gaming Headset. Razer's products generally do not come cheap, however, recently they have begun offering lower cost products such as the Arctosa Keyboard, which is still built and designed well but is a step-down from their flagship product lines. Most recently, Razer has now further entered the entry-level gaming mouse product with the introduction of the Salmosa, which is a sub-$40 USD but still promises high precision with its 3G infrared sensor.

June 29, 2009 -- The past few Linux kernel releases have brought a number of new file-systems to the Linux world, such as with EXT4 having been stabilized in the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, Btrfs being merged into Linux 2.6.29, and most recently the NILFS2 file-system premiering with the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. Other file-systems have been introduced too during the past few Linux kernel release cycles, but these three have been the most talked about and are often looked at as being the next-generation Linux file-systems. Being the benchmarking junkies that we are, we have set out to compare the file-system performance of EXT4, Btrfs, and NILFS2 under Ubuntu using the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. We also looked at how these file-systems compared to EXT3 and XFS.

June 26, 2009 -- Back in April we reviewed the ASRock X58 SuperComputer and found it to be a phenomenal motherboard for use with Intel Core i7 processors. While ASRock is regarded as being a budget manufacturer, this affordable Intel X58 motherboard could overclock quite far, ran well with Linux, and offered a great set of features. While that was a very nice Intel product, how are ASRock's current offerings on the AMD side? In this review we have our hands on the ASRock M3A780GXH/128M to see how well this AM3 Socket motherboard with a 780G + SB710 Chipset performs under Linux.

June 25, 2009 -- Back in March we reviewed the System76 Serval Professional Notebook and found it to be an excellent contender at the time. This notebook, which shipped with Ubuntu 8.10, had packed an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor with a GeForce 9800M GTS graphics card and other great hardware, but since then System76 has rolled out notebooks with newer and better hardware. One of the new notebooks to recently leave the System76 facilities is the Bonobo Professional, which packs an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9000 processor and an impressive NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M discrete graphics processor. In this article today we are seeing how this high-end notebook performs with Ubuntu 9.04.

June 23, 2009 -- Back in October we reported on the release of Alien Arena 2008, which brought several graphical improvements, such as GLSL enhancements, parallax mapping, and new shaders. The developers behind Alien Arena and its Quake 2 derived engine had not stopped there, but they immediately began work on Alien Arena 2009. Now just a mere six months later, we have Alien Arena 2009 and it brings more graphics improvements along with many other technical improvements and new game content.

June 22, 2009 -- The first alpha release of Mandriva Linux 2010 was released on Sunday. This development update brings a number of core improvements to Mandriva such as a faster boot time, Plymouth integration for enhancing the boot process, Tomoyo for providing the security framework, Moblin packaging, and various other improvements. In this article we are taking a brief look at Mandriva Linux 2010 Alpha 1.

June 19, 2009 -- After launching the GeForce 200 series last year, NVIDIA unveiled the GeForce GTX 260M and 280M GPUs for notebook computers earlier this year. The GeForce GTX 280M is currently NVIDIA's fastest notebook GPU, even though it is derived from the GeForce 9800GTX+ core rather than the GTX 280 desktop variant. This 55nm notebook GPU has 128 processing cores, supports two-way SLI, features NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology (important for VDPAU usage under Linux), and other features to pack a desktop performance punch in notebook computers. The Linux-friendly System76 manufacturer recently introduced the Bonobo Professional notebook computer with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M and an Intel Core 2 Quad processor, which we happen to be looking at now and today are delivering some initial performance results from this high-end NVIDIA GPU under Ubuntu Linux.

June 17, 2009 -- Last week we delivered benchmarks comparing the performance of Ubuntu 9.04 vs. Fedora 11 and found for the most part that these two incredibly popular Linux distributions had performed about the same, except for a few areas where there notable differences. However, like in the past when we have looked at Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 benchmarks or benchmarking the past five Linux kernels, we are now looking at the performance of Fedora over their past few releases. In this article we have a range of system benchmarks from Fedora 9, 10, 11, and the latest Rawhide packages as of this week.

June 15, 2009 -- Last week we published an in-depth article looking at the NVIDIA ION Linux Performance using a nettop device that contained this chipset with GeForce 9400M graphics rather than the usual Intel 945 graphics. From video playback to 2D to 3D, the graphics performance with the NVIDIA ION was wonderful. For that testing, the nettop we were using came courtesy of ZaReason and it was their new Ion Breeze 3770. In this review we are taking a closer look at the ZaReason Ion Breeze 3770 hardware.

June 12, 2009 -- To those running ATI Radeon graphics cards on Linux, this week has been very important with several key announcements having been made. The TTM memory manager is getting ready for inclusion into the Linux kernel, which finally will allow the open-source ATI driver (and soon the Nouveau driver too for NVIDIA hardware) to have kernel-based GPU memory management. With the memory management work set in the ATI driver via a mix of TTM and GEM, the ATI kernel mode-setting is also getting ready to be released as a staging driver within the Linux 2.6.31 kernel. The announcements this week have not been only about the GPU and Linux kernel, but the Radeon driver rewrite has also been merged to master. As we discussed in yesterday's news post, this Radeon Mesa re-write brings several key improvements immediately and there are still more features to come.

June 11, 2009 -- Fedora 11 was released earlier this week so we have set out to see how its desktop performance compares to that of Ubuntu 9.04, which was released back in April. Using the Phoronix Test Suite we compared these two leading Linux distributions in tasks like code compilation, Apache web server performance, audio/video encoding, multi-processing, ray-tracing, computational biology, various disk tasks, graphics manipulation, encryption, chess AI, image conversion, database, and other tests.

June 09, 2009 -- Earlier this year NVIDIA introduced the ION, which is their new system platform that pairs a GeForce 9400M GPU with an Intel Atom processor to make it an appealing platform for those desiring a netbook or nettop computer but are interested in a higher level of graphics performance than what is currently possible with Intel's integrated graphics. Products using the NVIDIA ION have been slow to emerge, but in recent weeks, we have begun seeing more devices around, including those from smaller manufacturers. One company that is now selling an ION-powered nettop is ZaReason, which is a Linux-focused hardware company. In this article we have a whole arsenal of Linux-based tests showing off the NVIDIA graphics performance with the Intel Atom processor under Linux.

June 08, 2009 -- Kernel mode-setting for Intel graphics hardware can already be found in the mainline Linux kernel and will be included by default in the release of Ubuntu 9.10 later this year. While Intel's kernel mode-setting support has been maturing in a steadfast manner, this support has not been moving along quite as fast for ATI and NVIDIA hardware. It is possible we will see ATI/AMD kernel mode-setting along with the necessary memory management support enter the Linux 2.6.31 kernel and potentially see this feature appear in Ubuntu 9.10 as an end-user option, but currently this support is still deemed under development. For those with ATI Radeon hardware looking to test out kernel mode-setting, there is now a Launchpad PPA and a LiveCD available for testing out these mode-setting capabilities atop Ubuntu.

June 05, 2009 -- A beta version of StormOS has emerged, which is a desktop distribution that is based upon the Nexenta Core Platform that in turn is derived from OpenSolaris but with an Ubuntu user-land. The StormOS project emerged out of the an OpenSolaris user being dissatisfied with the slow pace of OpenSolaris on netbooks and preferring the APT packaging system to Sun's Image Packaging System. The beta version of StormOS is shipping with an Xfce 4 desktop and -- unlike the current releases of OpenSolaris -- even ships with a word processor.

June 05, 2009 -- It was five years ago today, on the 5th of June 2004, that Phoronix.com launched. It was also one year ago to the day that Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 was released. Here are a few statistics and highlights from the past five years with what we have set out to accomplish with enriching the Linux hardware experience and driving Linux-based benchmarking and testing.