July 04, 2012 -- When it comes to operating systems for the TI OMAP4 PandaBoard and PandaBoard ES, Ubuntu Linux is usually the winner for several reasons. However, with last month's release of Fedora 17 for ARM, how is the Red Hat sponsored distribution running on these ARM development boards? Here's an overview of my experiences when running the latest Ubuntu and Fedora releases on the ARM Cortex A9 development hardware along with Arch Linux. There are also benchmarks comparing the ARM Linux performance.

July 02, 2012 -- While the N270, Intel's first-generation Atom processor for netbooks, is over four years old, the performance of this low-power CPU that wound up being found in a lot of netbook/nettops continues to improve under Linux -- well, sans a few regressions. Here are some benchmarks highlighting the performance changes when going from Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and then lastly a development snapshot of the forthcoming Ubuntu 12.10.

June 26, 2012 -- As the latest tests of Fedora 17 vs. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, here are benchmarks comparing the performance of an Intel Core i7 "Ivy Bridge" system on the two distributions named Beefy Miracle and Precise Pangolin, respectively.

June 25, 2012 -- With Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" set to be frozen soon, I took the opportunity to run some new benchmarks of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, the Debian OS variant using the FreeBSD kernel rather than Linux, to compare it to Debian GNU/Linux as well as Ubuntu Linux and PC-BSD/FreeBSD 9.0.

June 22, 2012 -- Before Apple releases Mac OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion" next month, here's a look at how the latest point release of Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" is performing compared to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" and the latest development snapshot of Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" Linux.

June 13, 2012 -- Last week I shared how the open-source R500 driver can compete with the legacy Catalyst Linux driver on an old Intel laptop with ATI graphics, but how has the performance for other areas of the system changed with the latest Ubuntu Linux code? In this article are benchmarks from other areas of this Core Duo laptop when running Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and then a recent development snapshot of Ubuntu 12.10.

June 06, 2012 -- While Ubuntu 12.04 already did a very good job at enhancing the ARM performance, Ubuntu 12.10 already has a number of performance improvements for ARM devices.

May 15, 2012 -- For those curious about the performance changes for Intel Sandy Bridge hardware when moving from Ubuntu 11.10 to Ubuntu 12.04, here is a quick overview.

May 07, 2012 -- Earlier in the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" development cycle I noted some performance improvements happening on the ARM side, particularly for Texas Instruments OMAP4. Namely, Ubuntu 12.04 was ARMing up for better performance with ARM hard-float support and the performance becoming more compelling for the PandaBoard ES hardware with proper cpufreq support. In this article is a comparison of the Ubuntu 11.10 and Ubuntu 12.04 ARM performance.

May 04, 2012 -- For the past few days I have been trying out the Microsoft Windows 8 Consumer Preview. For the most part, I would call Windows 8 a crap wreck, but it is not without a few advantages over Linux.