April 13, 2008 -- When pushing out the first public release of the Phoronix Test Suite, it was announced that the first stable (v1.0) release of this Linux benchmarking suite is codenamed "Trondheim", but what does that mean? After being bombarded with messages asking what is Trondheim or what it means as a codename, we have decided to explain it once and for all in this article.

April 07, 2008 -- Less than a week ago we pushed out the first public release of the Phoronix Test Suite. This GPLv3 Linux benchmarking software had received a great deal of interest, but v0.1 did have a few bugs and a number of uncompleted features. Yesterday though we pushed out version 0.2 of the Phoronix Test Suite with a number of improvements, new benchmarking profiles, and other changes. In addition to noting some of the improvements made in this release, there are also other Phoronix Test Suite highlights to share from this past week.

April 02, 2008 -- Back in early February we announced that we were in the process of formalizing and releasing our internal test tools as a platform for facilitating easy to use, accurate, and reproducible Linux benchmarks based upon the testing work that we have been doing at Phoronix for the past four years. The goals with this are really to make it easier for Linux end-users to run reliable (both qualitative and quantitative) benchmarks for their own personal use, push more open-source projects to making their software more testable, and pushing hardware and software vendors for greater Linux testing based upon a standardized set of tests. Today we are very pleased to announce the first public release of the Phoronix Test Suite software, which is licensed under the GNU GPLv3, and the creation of a public database for freely sharing your test results and other information in a collaborative manner.

March 17, 2008 -- The first alpha release of KDE 4.1 isn't planned until the end of April, but this past weekend the OpenSuSE team had updated their KDE Four Live spin against the latest KDE 4.0.66 snapshot packages. The KDE 4.0.66 development packages contain new Kickoff and Plasma features along with much other work to the numerous packages that will ultimately make up this first major update to KDE 4.

March 11, 2008 -- Last month we had measured Ubuntu's boot performance via the open-source Bootchart utility and had done this on all Ubuntu releases between Ubuntu 6.06 LTS and the latest development build at the time for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. From this testing we had found the boot time to decrease with each official release and the maximum disk throughput increasing. With Fedora 9 Sulphur due out next month, we have done this same boot performance testing on the Fedora side with Core 4, Core 5, Core 6, 7, 8, and 9 Rawhide.

March 09, 2008 -- A week ago, Canonical's Bryce Harrington had pushed an XRandR GUI into Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, which can now be found inside Alpha 6. This utility facilitates the dynamic management of displays using the RandR 1.2 extension, which is similar to URandR, GRandR, and other RandR front-ends. This new package has caught our attention and led us to explore its capabilities for display management.

March 07, 2008 -- In the first Compiz Fusion update since last October, Compiz Fusion 0.7.2 was released this morning and accompanied by an update to Compiz. This Compiz Fusion update was not only the first in five months, but also it was the first in the 0.7 development series leading up to the stable Compiz/Compiz Fusion 0.8 release. Compiz Fusion 0.7.2 has a number of new plug-ins (11 total) and also some changes to the configuration manager. The Compiz Config Settings Manager has some minor updates in different areas, while this release also includes an alternate settings manager. The Simple Compiz Config Settings Manager, or simple-ccsm as it's called, is focused for simplicity and looks dramatically different from the main settings manager. We have screenshots and comments on the simple-ccsm in this article.

February 18, 2008 -- Last December we had published benchmarks of seven versions of WINE, which covered up through the WINE 0.9.50 release. We had used two versions of Futuremark's 3DMark suite for testing, and with that we had found the performance to be stable in some cases while in later WINE releases we had found some performance losses. With the WINE project on a consistent two-week release cycle, we are looking at the WINE 3D performance and this time going back with the past eleven releases.

February 07, 2008 -- It's going on four years that we have been providing benchmarks under Linux at Phoronix, and through this time the process has evolved as more applications have come about that gauge Linux system performance and meet our criteria for use in hardware reviews. While our internal process is continually refined, we have received requests for creating a Linux benchmarking manifest so that interested parties are able to easily reproduce our tests for comparative purposes and know everything that's involved. With that said, we are now working to establish the Phoronix Test Suite that will consist both of detailed documentation defining our hardware benchmarking protocols and free software that automates much of this work.

February 05, 2008 -- Last Friday 4Front Technologies had released the binaries and source-code to OSS 4.0 Build 1013. This new build of the Open Sound System brings two major changes, which include the full source code now being available for the M-Audio Revolution and Delta sound card drivers, and a beta driver for the Sound Blast X-Fi series from Creative Labs. While earlier Sound Blaster generations have worked quite well with ALSA and OSS, the Creative X-Fi series is a black sheep under Linux. The X-Fi support that Creative Labs has provided to the Linux community has been abominable and support via ALSA (the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) has yet to go anywhere while support for the complete X-Fi series via OSS is just starting to emerge. Interestingly though, Creative had provided the register documentation and other code to 4Front Technologies for this new "sbxfi" driver.