July 16, 2007 -- While the Avivo driver doesn't yet contain 3D functionality or support a number of features found in the official fglrx driver and the community Radeon driver, it is making steady progress despite its age. Most recently with the open-source R500 driver implementing shadow frame-buffer support, we have experienced a noticeable increase in performance. As we have begun to receive messages from those interested in this driver wondering about the performance capabilities, we have carried out a brief GtkPerf test comparing the Avivo git code to ATI's official binary "fglrx" display driver.

July 15, 2007 -- It was just a month ago that the open-source Avivo driver for the ATI Radeon X1000 (R500) series was introduced to the public, but in this time we've seen some great progress made. This open-source R500 driver now contains RandR 1.2 support, support for a variety of R500 graphics cards, and most recently support for Shadow Framebuffer was added. The Avivo driver still isn't comparable when it comes to the features found in the fglrx driver or even the open-source Radeon driver for the R200/300/400 series, but it's a work in progress. If you are running into problems with the fglrx driver, stuck using the VESA driver for one reason or another, or just want to get rid of the binary blob and experiment with this open-source driver, we have written a guide for setting up the Avivo driver from source on Ubuntu.

July 13, 2007 -- It was earlier this month that version 2.1.0 of the xf86-video-intel driver was released, which among other things had introduced open-source Linux graphics support for the G33, Q33, and Q35 chipsets as well as fixing a horde of bugs and adding PCI IDs for the 945GME, 965GME, and 965GLE chips. As our last Intel graphics performance article was looking at the Q965 back in May, in this article we have enclosed some benchmarks from Intel's GMA 950 IGP using the new xf86-video-intel 2.1.0 driver.

July 04, 2007 -- It was on July 20, 2006 that I had issued The State of ATI Linux while ending off the ATI Redblog, which was a fifty-day experiment for using the ATI fglrx driver under Linux exclusively to see how well the driver really could compare to that of NVIDIA's binary competition. It's going on a year later and it's now time for this year's address as far as what I have seen from the driver in the past year and where I hope and believe the driver is going in the near future.

June 30, 2007 -- The last time we had written an article on Nouveau, the community project working on developing an open-source 3D display driver for NVIDIA hardware, was this past January after being enlightened by glxgears finally being able to run on NVIDIA's NV4x GPUs. Since then many developments have occurred with this open-source NVIDIA driver as we have covered in several news postings. In this article today we will share with you where the Nouveau project stands today from a user perspective as well as testing out the driver on a few more NVIDIA systems.

June 28, 2007 -- The train has gone off the tracks. In The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux, AMD's Matthew Tippett had shared with us that the AMD driver release cycle is like a train and that "...we are on the train, and to add a new carriage or update the carriage, we have to do it while the train is running, without stopping the train, or letting anything fall off." However, this morning the train (AMD's release schedule) has went off the tracks for the penguin riders. AMD has issued its first-ever hot-fix release for the Linux fglrx driver. This release corrects an aticonfig crash that removes the xorg.conf if you are using the vesa driver.

June 27, 2007 -- David Stevens, a Linux user and Phoronix reader, had written a letter to ATI/AMD expressing concern over their lack of providing an official free software driver. David had asked this letter be made openly available and shared with our readers. You may share your thoughts on the fglrx driver and ATI/AMD's lack of an open-source driver in the Phoronix Forums. Like this letter, Phoronix accepts quality editorials and pieces written by the community.

June 25, 2007 -- Hitting the web this afternoon was the AMD 8.38.6 display driver. Introduced in this driver was official Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 packaging scripts. Fixed in this driver was moving a video window between two monitors in a Big Desktop configuration no longer crashing the X.Org server and playing multiple videos when TexturedVideo is enabled no longer results in corruption.

June 24, 2007 -- At Phoronix we are constantly exploring the different display drivers under Linux, and while we have reviewed Sun's Check Tool and test motherboards with Solaris in addition to covering a few other areas, we have yet to perform a graphics driver comparison between Linux and Solaris. That is until today. With interest in Solaris on the rise thanks to Project Indiana, we have decided to finally offer our first quantitative graphics comparison between Linux and Solaris with the NVIDIA proprietary drivers.

June 21, 2007 -- It was just two weeks ago that NVIDIA had introduced the 100.14.09 display driver, but today we have another new Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD driver out from the green binary camp. The NVIDIA 100.14.11 display driver adds support for their new GeForce 7 integrated graphics, fixes console restoration problems, and improves some other areas of their Linux (as well as FreeBSD and Solaris) driver.