This Week: Intel, Graphics & Mobile Linux

Intel hosted their developer conference this week in San Francisco (Intel Developer Forum) where several new announcements were made, with Linux being involved in some of these announcements. It was revealed that Dell will begin shipping Ubuntu Moblin Netbook Remix on one of their Atom-powered netbooks, Moblin 2.0 was released, and there was a snapshot of Moblin 2.1 was released. This week we also showed off some new Lynnfield Linux benchmarks that Intel had sent over to us using the Phoronix Test Suite.

While Moblin 2 has been coming along nicely thanks to Intel's work, Canonical has been working hard on their Ubuntu mobile offerings and Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix is looking great. Also coming out of Canonical was the Ubuntu 10.04 release schedule. Driving the interfaces on both Moblin and Ubuntu Netbook Remix is Clutter, which is a GNOME project, and this past week there was the release of GNOME 2.28.0. So now it's time to start getting excited for GNOME 3.0, which will be out next March.

In the usual graphics roundabout there was the X Server 1.7 RC2 release, VA-API-based video acceleration for Flash, a faster Gallium3D Softpipe driver, news that Mesa 7.6 should be released next week, and X-Video code for Gallium3D. There are also plans to change the X.Org release process to hopefully start pushing out timed, quality releases of this critical piece of software.

Also covered at Phoronix this week were Linux 2.6.31 KVM Benchmarks, Theora 1.1 was released, the Gentoo Ten LiveDVD, and Wine 1.1.30 was released with more Direct3D 10.0 improvements. We also shared about new features for the Phoronix Test Suite with proving statistical significance in benchmarks.

I will be away this week again, but in my absence there will be benchmarks of FreeBSD 8.0-RC vs. Ubuntu 9.10, 2D benchmarks comparing R600/700 graphics with the open and closed-source drivers, a review of an ECS 785G motherboard, and potentially the answers to the NVIDIA Q&A we recently had. There will likely be some news coming out of the X Developers' Conference taking place early next week as well.