February 02, 2008 -- A week ago we reported that a second preview release of Project Indiana, Sun's attempt at creating an operating system for the desktop based upon OpenSolaris and led by Ian Murdock, was on track to be released in the near future. Thursday afternoon that became true with the test image surfacing for Developer Preview 2 of Project Indiana, or what will formally be called OpenSolaris. Officially, this new release is known as the OpenSolaris Developer Preview 1/08 edition. The general availability release of Project Indiana is expected in March, but today we have up a tour of this new Indiana release.

January 29, 2008 -- Back in November we started sharing some of the exciting features planned for the GNOME 2.22 and 2.24 releases, and now that the first GNOME 2.22.0 Beta release is planned for later this week, we have taken another look at the packages set for inclusion and the changes that have actually been made. While nothing groundbreaking will be introduced in GNOME 2.22, this desktop environment does have some moderate changes worth noting. In this article are eight interesting packages that either have noticeable changes since GNOME 2.20 or are new to GNOME. This list isn't all-inclusive or ordered in any particular fashion, but just eight changes that had caught our attention.

December 11, 2007 -- The year is winding down and while we have a lot to look forward to next year, what were the greatest Linux innovations of this year? This year at Phoronix, we have published over 325 articles, with most of them being Linux hardware and graphics reviews, and that is in addition to over 700 original news entries. After spending much time in considering what the "best" and most substantial Linux gains over the year have been, we have comprised a list of what we believe are the greatest Linux innovations of 2007 along with our reasoning behind these decisions.

December 10, 2007 -- We discovered back in September when running the Razer Barracuda AC-1 with ALSA 1.0.15 that this sound card was quite problematic with the initial CMI8788 ALSA driver. However, last month we reported that the driver was being rewritten from scratch with a much brighter outlook. We have retested the Barracuda AC-1 with its C-Media CMI8788 Oxygen APU using the latest snd-oxygen driver, which also works with other high-end sound cards such as the ASUS Xonar and Auzentech X-Meridian.

December 09, 2007 -- The WINE project is going on 15 years in existence, and two years ago, it finally went into beta. Through the beta stage, there has been a consistent release about every two weeks, which often brings a fair number of improvements to this software for running Windows programs on Linux (and other operating systems). Sparked by curiosity as to how the performance of WINE is affected release by release, we have gone through and benchmarked the past seven releases. While this only represents the past four months of work by the WINE community, the results may surprise you.

November 26, 2007 -- Recently there has been much talk about RandR 1.2 support with RadeonHD and Nouveau (among other drivers), and as a result we have been asked many times now "what is RandR, and why do I care?" Well, RandR is the "Resize and Rotate" extension in X.Org and the v1.2 update introduces new functionality such as dynamic hot-plugging support for display devices. To help those who may be new to Linux or just never took advantage of this X.Org technology, we have written a brief guide with some of the RandR basics.

November 14, 2007 -- It was a month ago that we first looked at SplashTop on the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe motherboard and found this to be a very exciting and forthcoming technology. If you missed our earlier article, SplashTop is an instant-on Linux desktop environment. Within a matter of seconds after turning on the motherboard -- and without using a hard drive -- you're able to access a Firefox-based web browser and the Skype VoIP client. As we shared in a later update, SplashTop will also be shipping on desktops and notebooks next year. While the only motherboard to integrate SplashTop right now is the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe, the SplashTop source code has been released as of this morning. A SplashTop SDK is in the works, but for now, the GPL code is available.

November 07, 2007 -- Firefox 2.0 is just over a year old, but the Mozilla developers are out today with the first beta for Mozilla Firefox 3.0. Firefox 3.0 (known as Gran Paradiso) uses the Gecko 1.9 engine, and features a number of improvements including improved add-on support, remote bookmarks, OpenID compliance, AirBag crash reporting integration, microformats support, saving web pages as PDF files, and other reworks that affect the bookmarks, searching, etc. If you're not feeling adventurous to try out Mozilla Firefox 3.0 quite yet, we have included some screenshots of Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 running on Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. Judging by all of the improvements to this open-source web browser, it will be a great addition for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.

November 05, 2007 -- With the projected increase in the elderly population, the rising cost of health-care, and the lack of available resources to those with Alzheimer's and other neuro-degenerative diseases, a new technology start-up is hoping to alleviate some of this burden and create a new opportunity for Linux in the next-generation tele-health market. Reside@HOME is an "aging in place" solution that's designed to keep those with diminished cognitive ability independent and in their own residence for as long as possible. Part of what makes this interesting; however, is that the device is Linux-based -- Ubuntu Linux to be exact. Blue Heron Network LLC, the company behind Reside@HOME, will be formally introducing this solution in the first quarter of 2008, but in this article are some details about this unique Linux-based health-care product.

October 30, 2007 -- KDE 4.0 Beta 4 was released earlier today and it features a number of bug fixes along with cleaning up the KDE code-base and at the same time adding a few new enhancements to the KDE 4.0 feature set. The OpenSuSE-based KDE Four LiveCD was also upgraded this afternoon to version 0.6. With the changes in KDE 4.0 Beta 4 and the shear number of improvements in KDE 4.0, we have taken some screenshots from this latest testing release and have them here for your viewing pleasure.