In revisiting the OpenGL graphics and gaming performance for an older Intel Core i5 "Sandy Bridge" Apple system, the Ubuntu 13.04 performance with Intel's open-source graphics driver is now easily surpassing Apple's OpenGL driver found in OS X 10.8.3.

Microsoft has finally done the Skype for Linux 4.2 update, which rolls in a bunch of bug-fixes but still doesn't put the Linux Skype client on par with OS X or Windows.

Just two weeks after talking about a Qt 5 tool-kit port for the Tizen platform being worked on, the first release is now available.

Version 0.1 of KTAP has been released to provide a new scripting dynamic tracing tool for the Linux kernel.

The second release candidate for the Linux 3.10 kernel is now out there. Torvalds released 3.10-rc2 on Monday with a few extra pulls that he wouldn't have accepted later on in the release cycle.

Just three months after the exciting QEMU 1.4 release, QEMU 1.5 is now available with many exciting and new features for those using this open-source software in a virtualized world. There's the VFIO VGA pass-through support, USB 3.0 improvements, and much more.

The Handbrake open-source video transcoder program now supports using OpenCL for accelerating certain operations along with introducing other new features to its brand new 0.9.9 release.

One month after Rob Clark began developing his Freedreno Gallium3D stack for Qualcomm's Adreno A3xx hardware, he's beginning to achieve visual success. While the code hasn't yet been merged into mainline Mesa, on an A320 as found on the Google Nexus 4 he has es2gears (the OpenGL ES version of glxgears) successfully running on this open-source code.

The ex-Nokia developers that formed Jolla to work on Sailfish OS to work on a new range of Linux-based smartphones to start where MeeGo left off, have announced their first smartphone.

It's been a while since last running any Ubuntu Linux disk encryption benchmarks, but thanks to recent encryption improvements within the upstream Linux ecosystem, it's time to deliver some new Linux disk encryption benchmarks. In this article are results comparing Ubuntu 13.04 without any form of disk encryption to using the home directory encryption feature (eCryptfs-based) and full-disk encryption (using LUKS with an encrypted LVM).

At long last the third major version of Mageia, the popular community fork of Mandriva Linux, is now available. There's a lot of new stuff to Mageia 3 like a new version of RPM and updated systemd, but the distribution is still not shipping GRUB2 by default.

The NetBSD project has announced the simultaneous releases of NetBSD 6.0.2 and NetBSD 6.1, with the latter introducing new features to the open-source operating system.

Linux graphics drivers have come a long way in recent years for both the open and closed-source solutions from AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel. In this Sunday article, a Phoronix reader has shared his experiences in going from failing to setup two monitors under Linux just a few years ago with NVIDIA to now successfully driving six monitors on a single system using the AMD Linux driver.

On Friday there was the controversial news about the Linux "ondemand" cpufreq governor no longer being fit for best performance and power-savings on modern processors. Fortunately, for better handling the CPU frequency stage changes on modern Intel CPUs, Intel recently introduced the new P-State kernel driver.

The FreeBSD camp continues to develop pkgng, a next-generation binary package manager for the operating system.

Taking a break from our usual Linux hardware coverage and performance benchmarking this weekend is a look at the Sumo Emperor, a comfortable basis for lounging or working from a laptop.

DNF is the experimental fork of the Yum package manager that premiered in Fedora 18. While much hasn't been heard of this experimental Yum replacement since its debut, work on it has still been progressing and is turning out to be in great shape, is slowly approaching feature-parity with Yum, and is faster.

While Linux game developers and publishers have grown more interested in the Linux market-share over the past year following Valve's major Linux play, one of the sectors that is still lagging behind is gaming hardware and peripherals. Fortunately, Logitech is finally beginning to show their Linux cards.

While it's not the default Linux graphics driver for Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge hardware, the "ilo" independently-developed Gallium3D driver for modern Intel graphics hardware continues to be developed.

As our latest coverage of the Linux 3.10 kernel comes new comparison benchmarks of the latest development kernel compared to its predecessor from an Intel Core i7 laptop sporting NVIDIA graphics.

The first point release to the GCC 4.8 compiler was made available in release candidate form on Friday, ahead of the official release that's expected next week.

Building upon our F2FS file-system benchmarks from earlier in this week is a large comparison of four of the leading Linux file-systems at the moment: Btrfs, EXT4, XFS, and F2FS. With the four Linux kernel file-systems, each was benchmarked on the Linux 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10-rc1 kernels. The results from this large file-system comparison when backed by a solid-state drive are now published on Phoronix.

Earlier this month I delivered Radeon DRM driver benchmarks and Nouveau DRM driver benchmarks from the in-development Linux 3.10 kernel. Being published this Friday evening are now Intel Ivy Bridge graphics benchmarks from the Linux 3.10 kernel compared to the earlier releases going back to Linux 3.5.

By default the Linux kernel uses the "ondemand" CPU frequency governor for achieving maximum clock frequency when system load is high and a lower clock frequency when the system is idle. However, it turns out that for at least modern Intel CPUs, this is likely no longer the case. This default kernel choice may lead to poor battery life and performance for modern Linux systems.

Just days after the Mozilla Firefox 21 release, the first beta of the next Firefox 22 release is now available.

The openSUSE development community has announced the immediate release of the first milestone release of openSUSE 13.1. This is the distribution's first development release ahead of their plans to ship 13.1 final in November.

The SolidRun CuBox is advertised as the "world's smallest desktop computer" with a size of just two-inches cubed (5cm). The CuBox is powered by an ARM PJ4 800MHz SoC and now it has available an open-source DRM Linux graphics driver.

LLVM continues to show its adaptability with the innovative compiler infrastructure now being used by JADE, the Just-In-Time Adaptive Decoder Engine. JADE is an LLVM-powered generic video decoder.

Curious to see how the performance of the open-source ATI/AMD Linux graphics driver is evolving for aging hardware, a new round of OpenGL benchmarks were carried out on the once-popular ATI Radeon HD 4870 "RV770" graphics card. The performance was compared between the Mesa 7.11, 8.0, 9.0, 9.1, and 9.2-devel Git releases from an Ubuntu Linux system to see how the performance has changed for this driver in the past two years.

Yesterday evening I mentioned Ubuntu Linux developers would be discussing replacing Mozilla Firefox with Google Chromium as the default web-browser in Ubuntu 13.10. After the discussion today, it looks like this may very well happen.

As mentioned already this morning, the plan with Ubuntu 13.10 is to have an experimental Unity 8 desktop powered by Mir for those wishing to toy around with Canonical's next-generation work. The default, however, will be Unity 7 in an X.Org environment. Even so, the Unity 7 desktop along with the Compiz window manager will receive some refinements for the next Ubuntu release.

KDE's Krita painting application back in the day was one of the first to support an OpenGL-accelerated canvas. After their GL support fell behind, it's now been brought up to speed by porting their graphics rendering code-paths to supporting an OpenGL 3.1 Core Profile and OpenGL ES 2.0.

For those Linux enthusiasts wishing to toy with the Mir Display Server and Canonical's next-generation Unity 8 interface, they will be made optionally available for desktop users with the Ubuntu 13.10 release due out in October.

The first release candidate of the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint 15 distribution is now available. Linux Mint 15 incorporates the latest MATE and Cinnamon desktop improvements along with offering their Linux desktop users some new tools.

GNOME 3.8.2 was released this morning and it serves as the last bug-fix release in the GNOME 3.8 series. All work now is being focused on GNOME 3.10.

In an effort to make Enlightenment E17 available through the openSUSE installer and DVD, the lightweight LXDE desktop environment may be pushed away.

After KVM virtualization was brought to ARM last year with the ARM Cortex-A15 SoCs supporting hardware virtualization, support for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) SoCs is being prepared.

SlateKit Shell is a new QML-based web-browser sporting a "sliding drawer" user-interface. The WebKit-powered browser is written entirely in QML and JavaScript.

The second development release of the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 4.6-Utsira open-source benchmarking platform is now available for Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X, and Windows operating systems.

Linux developers are considering this week replacing Mozilla Firefox with Chromium, Google's open-source version of their Chrome web-browser, for the Ubuntu 13.10 release.

With one week to go until the soft feature freeze for KDE 4.11, there's a better idea for the features that are likely to come to the next major release of the KDE Plasma desktop.

Arch Linux replaced MySQL with MariaDB, openSUSE gutted MySQL, Fedora replaced MySQL, and now Ubuntu Linux is looking to continue the trend.

While NVIDIA Optimus and other multi-GPU/hybrid laptop graphics systems have been available for years, in the Linux world support for these capabilities is still in the early stages.

Yesterday during the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit to begin working out Ubuntu 13.10 plans were more discussions surrounding the distribution's proposed new packaging system.

One month after the release of X3: Terran Conflict for Linux, Egosoft has now released X3: Albion Prelude.

Released today was a new version of the DRM library and adjoining Mesa changes to address MSAA texture issues affecting AMD Radeon Evergreen and Cayman graphics hardware running the open-source Gallium3D driver.

Version 2.0 of PyPy, an alternative implementation of the Python language, has been released.

Martin Gräßlin, the maintainer of KDE's KWin window manager, has been vocal against Canonical's Mir Display Server from the beginning. He's now written another blog post on the matter in which he makes it rather clear there is little hope of seeing KDE running on the Ubuntu Wayland-competitor.

Last month it was the X.Org Server with a noted security vulnerability and now this time around it's the Linux kernel.

A beta release of the Ubuntu SDK is currently slated for availability in July. Other plans for the Ubuntu SDK were also expressed today during this week's virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit.