Phoronix has been reporting for a while a now that it looks like Wine 1.4 would be released by April of 2012. This looks like it will all pan out with Wine 1.4 now entering a code freeze and 1.4-rc1 was released this Friday rather than a Wine 1.3 development point release.

Fedora 17 is moving forward with plans whereby the entire base operating system will live within /usr by condensing several common directories that have been long-standing to Linux distributions.

After illustrating Linux power regressions and other problems for months, with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS developers at Canonical are finally taking a serious look at Linux power management and how it can be bettered.

There's still one week until the work will be officially announced, but the open-source "Lima" open-source graphics driver project has surfaced.

Linaro developers are nearly done with their milestone of upstream support for OpenGL ES 2.0 with Compiz, Nux, and Unity. This will allow for the Unity 3D desktop to work on more mobile devices and other cases where only GLES support is available.

Timothee Bessett, the id Software developer that was responsible for porting many of id Software's popular games like Doom 3 and Quake 4 to Linux, has resigned from the popular game company.

The leading open-source code compilers -- namely the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and LLVM/Clang -- now have maturing support for Intel's Sandy Bridge microarchitecture with further optimizations for the forthcoming Ivy Bridge successor. With the current and next-generation Intel support covered, open-source compiler developers have already moved onto beginning work for supporting Intel's Haswell microarchitecture that will not be launched until 2013.

Daniel Vetter of Intel has published a new patch-set to enable interlaced support within their DRM kernel driver.

FFmpeg 0.10 is now available with several new filters, MUXers, encoders, and decoders for this very popular audio/video library.

A discussion for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS has been ignited about bringing back an "Ubuntu Classic" option that would attempt to mimic the old GNOME 2.x experience. Meanwhile in the Fedora camp there is a discussion about a Unity desktop port to their distribution.

After a very long and exhausting development process that's been going on since 2003, while simultaneously developing the Samba 3.x series, Samba 4.0 is dancing closer to an official release this year.

Back in December there was an announcement from NVIDIA that they would open-source their CUDA compiler based upon the LLVM back-end. NVIDIA today released their new CUDA implementation that's based upon LLVM. Besides being open-source, which will allow it to be ported to new (non-NVIDIA) architectures/hardware, there's also a measurable speed boost in the switch over to LLVM.

In this article is a look at the state of the open-source Nouveau Gallium3D driver on low-end NVIDIA GeForce graphics hardware. In particular, a $10 USD NVIDIA retail graphics card is being tested under Ubuntu Linux on both Nouveau and the proprietary NVIDIA driver and is then compared to a wide range of other low and mid-range offerings from NVIDIA's GeForce and AMD's Radeon graphics card line-up with a plethora of OpenGL benchmarks.

Now that Mesa is beginning to catch-up with support for newer versions of OpenGL and the OpenGL performance is slowly improving, with more games and applications beginning to work on this open-source graphics driver stack as a result, the need for application workarounds is becoming more prevalent.

Btrfs, the quite promising next-generation Linux file-system that's been in-development for years by Chris Mason and others, is about to take on a big role within Oracle's Enterprise Linux distribution.

There's an update to the ongoing X.Org Endless Vacation of Code work, which is currently funding a developer to work on the OpenCL upbringing within the open-source world for graphics drivers. The latest work going on has been redesigning and largely rewriting the Clover state tracker that will provide the OpenCL support to Gallium3D graphics drivers.

As shared on Phoronix in many articles already, Canonical has big plans for Ubuntu in the ARM-space. They are looking forward to making Ubuntu Linux be the first operating system to support the forthcoming ARM Cortex A15, but before that and the other achievements they have planned, they must first ship Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. With Ubuntu 12.04 there is already some exciting improvements on the ARM front, including ARM hard-float support, better OMAP4 support, and other packaging improvements. In this article are some early benchmarks of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" from the PandaBoard ES. For some workloads, Ubuntu 12.04 is remarkably faster than Ubuntu 11.10.

AMD has unleashed the first Catalyst Linux binary driver update of 2012, but does Catalyst 12.1 bring anything interesting or just more breakage?

Version 4.8 of the KDE Platform, Plasma, and Applications is now available to improve the KDE user experience. There's a lot of new features along with better performance, improved stability, and a whole lot of bug-fixes.

A NVIDIA Linux engineer is trying to work on code that could lead to official Optimus support under Linux, but there's a catch... And it falls outside of NVIDIA Corp as the fate of this multi-GPU notebook feature could now fall with the Linux kernel developers.

ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, last saw a major update in February of 2011. That changed this morning when ALSA 1.0.25 was released, which is a big feature release.

The S3 Chrome 600 series / VIA VT3456 (VX11) still hasn't been officially announced, but here are some benchmarks of the forthcoming chipset from a VIA Nano quad-core system.

Another one of the interesting talks that was recorded from Linux.Conf.Au in Ballarat, Australia last week was the presentation by Matthew Garrett. He went over the good and bad of UEFI support under Linux.

Unigine Corp met their latest deadline and will officially be shipping the gold version of their Unigine OilRush real-time strategy game today for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows gamers.

A discussion erupted this morning among Fedora developers about having a version of Fedora Linux that operates on a rolling-release model similar to Arch Linux, Gentoo, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

While Nouveau for open-source NVIDIA support in Mesa 8.0 is mixed, the developers behind this reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver are making some progress and hope to have more positive information to report soon.

Mark Shuttleworth has announced a "heads-up display" that Canonical has been working on for its initial debut to be made with the release of the 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" release.

Cinnamon, the fork of the GNOME 3.x Shell by Linux Mint developers to make it more like the GNOME2 desktop, is now at version 1.2. This latest stable, major release does bring some tasty changes.

Chris Mason of Btrfs fame wasn't the only Linux file-system developer talking to the public last week. While the Btrfs talk was going on in Los Angeles at SCALE 10x, Dave Chinner was down under in Australia at LCA2012 talking about XFS. His talk included some controversial shots at EXT4 and Btrfs.

In an email to Phoronix, Digia has clarified their Qt Commercial releases and further affirmed their commitment to the public Qt Project.

Thanks to recent advancements by Intel's Open-Source Technology Center, the open-source Linux graphics driver not only supports more OpenGL 3.0 functionality than Apple's Intel graphics driver for Mac OS X, but the performance is more competitive. In some cases, the OpenGL performance is now superior under Linux with the open-source driver that is developed by Intel in conjunction with the free software community. This article is looking at the performance of Intel Sandy Bridge graphics under Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" and Ubuntu Linux.

Fedora 17, codenamed the Beefy Miracle, has yet another new round of features. One of the items though includes this beefy release having DIET.

David Mandala of Canonical talked last week at Linux.Conf.Au 2012 about the history of Ubuntu Linux supporting the ARM architecture, what's coming up for Ubuntu ARM in the 12.04 LTS release, and even what's expected from Ubuntu on ARM as far out as 2015.

An fsck utility capable of fixing problems on the Btrfs file-system is imminent. Plus other features continue to be worked on for this next-generation, open-source Linux file-system.

At SCALE 10x a new FUSE implementation was presented that while still having the file-system in user-space, the kernel component is now responsible for more of the work.

MythTV 0.24.2 was released over the weekend.

For those that were interested by the CompuLab Trim-Slice, a desktop built around the ARM-based NVIDIA Tegra 2 platform, here are some more benchmarks. This time the numbers are looking at the performance of the dual-core ARM Cortex A9 system when using the Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10, and 12.04 packages.

Tuxera has released a new community version of their NTFS-3G FUSE file-system implementation. This release packs some new features.

The XBMC media player may soon be supported to run directly atop the Linux KMS interfaces as well as the Wayland Display Server.

MPlayer2 -- a fork of the popular MPlayer open-source project that's added on several new features -- has been quiet for a few months but is still being actively developed.

Besides formally announcing an open-source, reverse-engineered ARM graphics driver, there's lots of pother interesting X.Org / Wayland related talks happening in two weeks at FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels, Belgium.

Desura, the Steam-like game distribution service that came natively to Linux last year, is now open-source.

While there's a lot of improvements in the Linux 3.3 kernel, it's not perfect. Here's some of what's unfortunately missing from this forthcoming kernel.

A road-map has been published for openSUSE 12.2, which puts this next release out for official availability in July.

For those less than impressed by Corel releasing some professional-grade Linux photography software earlier this month, Adobe still not providing native Linux clients for their popular applications, and haven't been fond of the major open-source photography programs out there, you may want to try out Darktable.

The 10th annual Southern California Linux Expo formally begins today in Los Angeles. Here's a preview.

There is some exciting news to break today on Phoronix... Coming up at FOSDEM (the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting in Brussels) will be the formal announcement of an open-source, reverse-engineered graphics driver for the ARM Mali graphics processor. OpenGL ES triangles are in action on open-source code. Will this be the start of fully open-source ARM graphics drivers for Android and Linux?

Now that X Input 2.2 with Multi-Touch is merged into X.Org Server 1.12, which will be released by early March, it's time for the tool-kit and application developers to take advantage of the support. It looks like GNOME will be on the ball this time around with GTK+ 3.4 looking to handle multi-touch.

Bumblebee 3.0 "Tumbleweed" has been released as an updated (and unofficial) way of handling NVIDIA Optimus technology under Linux.

While it will not take you up to the speeds of the Catalyst driver, besides the 2D color tiling patches, there are a few other outstanding features not yet enabled-by-default in the open-source Radeon graphics driver that can yield some performance boosts. One of these other features is enabling PCI Express 2.0 support within the Radeon DRM.

Just about 24 hours ago I spread the news about a major vulnerability in X.Org / XKB that makes it trivial for anyone with physical access to a Linux-based desktop system to easily bypass any screensaver lock whether you're using GNOME, KDE, or most other desktop environments. So what's changed in the past day?

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.3-rc1 kernel on Thursday afternoon that marks the closure of the two-week Linux 3.3 kernel merge window.

In 2011 when talking about Digia putting out new Qt Commercial releases with over one hundred changes compared to what's found in the open-source/community Qt repository, many Phoronix readers were upset by this large delta. Digia is still putting out new Qt Commercial releases that carry large differences to the upstream open-source releases, but they've offered up the patches for mainline integration.

What happens when you pull out some vintage computer hardware and run the latest Linux software as well as go back and run some of the oldest software available? Well, in the case of systems with antiquated R300-era ATI Radeon graphics, you are left with a downward slope in performance. Not only is the latest open-source Radeon graphics driver not always performing as well as an ancient Catalyst driver, but also the power consumption of the latest Linux code remains on an incline.

Tiago Vignatti, one of the active developers at Intel who's dedicated to the Wayland team, has shared some active TODO list items that for those wishing to contribute can easily jump on.

Linus Torvalds has been called upon to pull the NVM Express driver into the Linux 3.3 mainline kernel.

I've been alerted this afternoon that there's an outstanding security vulnerability within the current X.Org Server that's receiving little attention. This active vulnerability could allow anyone with physical access to your system to easily bypass the desktop's screen lock regardless of your desktop environment.

Relics of Annorath, a game announced last year, is nearing its alpha release. This forthcoming MMORPG game is built atop the Unigine Engine and will feature a native Linux client.

The XAA 2D acceleration architecture is finally set to be stripped out of X.Org Server 1.13 and upstream open-source X.Org drivers.

Back in 2007 (the Linux 2.6.21 days) the mainline Linux kernel received tickless idle support. With the system idling, the timer tick no longer needlessly goes off with the "NOHZ" feature. Being worked on since last year is now adaptive tickless support, which extends the tickless functionality to non-idle cases.

Besides tool-kit advancements, other happenings in the world of Wayland this week pertain to coming up with a suitable window stacking and raising design for this next-generation display server.

Now that the Nouveau, Radeon, and LLVMpipe graphics drivers have been tested under Mesa 8.0, what is left? The Intel DRI driver, of course! The open-source Sandy Bridge Linux graphics support is shining with Mesa 8.0 thanks to OpenGL 3.0 support and measurable performance improvements. Intel Ivy Bridge is also ready to run under Linux.