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Beyond pushing out a new graphical boot screen just before the feature freeze went into effect for Ubuntu 9.10, Canonical released the first public version of their own app store, previously codenamed AppCenter, but now known as the Ubuntu Software Store (or software-store as its package is called). Canonical does have some grand plans for the Ubuntu Software Store and in this article we have some screenshots of what it looks like currently and how it functions along with some of their plans for the future.

By the time Ubuntu 10.04 LTS rolls around next April, Canonical is interested in seeing Ubuntu boot on an Intel Atom netbook (specifically the Dell Mini 9) in less than ten seconds. These incredibly fast boot time goals even led Canonical to decide against investing more time in enhancing the boot experience with Red Hat's Plymouth. Canonical has already come close to achieving this with the Ubuntu 9.04 release earlier this year, but how is Ubuntu 9.10 changing the boot time with defaulting to the EXT4 file-system and their other ongoing changes? In this article, we have re-installed Ubuntu 8.10, 9.04, and a 9.10 development snapshot on two netbooks and one laptop to see how Ubuntu's boot time is changing.

Last week we provided benchmarks of Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4, but Ubuntu is not the only Linux distribution preparing for a major update in the coming months. Also released in the past few days were OpenSuSE 11.2 Milestone 6 and Mandriva Linux 2010.0 Beta 1. To see how these three popular distributions compare, we set out to do our usual Linux benchmarking dance.

Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4 was released last week and with all of its updated packages and changes compared to Ubuntu 9.04, we decided to carry out a fresh round of benchmarks comparing Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4. We used a Samsung NC10 for testing with an Intel Atom N270, 2GB of DDR2 memory, a 32GB OCZ Core Series V2 SSD, and Intel 945GME graphics.

When benchmarking development releases of Fedora in particular, they often end up being much slower than the final build and perform lower when compared against some of the other leading desktop distributions. As we have mentioned in previous articles, this is generally due to the debugging support enabled within the development builds of Fedora. To see just what the performance cost is, we have compared the Fedora 11 performance of the normal kernel against the kernel-debug package. Additionally, we also compared the performance when disabling SELinux and system auditing support.

Have you considered embracing Linux in any of your articles? If you have, but have not acted on such thoughts, why is that? Is it the Linux learning curve? The "lack of benchmarks"? Simply the lack of resources on the part of your editors and product evaluators? After speaking with several editors from fellow publications, these seem to be most of the excuses at hand. However, at Phoronix Media, we have the solutions to these problems -- and they are free and easy to adopt. I would invite you to think how using Linux to complement your Windows testing in hardware reviews could benefit your publication by providing more thorough reviews to fulfill the needs of more readers, wooing more hardware companies with having another feature to offer, and generate additional page views from having more content.

We reviewed the FirePro V8700 1GB workstation graphics card back in March, but AMD has now introduced its evolutionary successor to this ultra high-end product, and that is the ATI FirePro V8750 2GB. The FirePro V8750 continues to be based off the ATI RV770 graphics processor, but is now backed by 2GB of 900MHz GDDR5 memory. Bumping the memory speed by 50MHz has raised the peak memory bandwidth from 108GB/s to 115GB/s. How well though does this $1,800 USD graphics card work with Linux? Well, we have all of the benchmarks in this article.

Phoronix Media has released version 2.0 (codenamed "Sandtorg") of the Phoronix Test Suite, which encompasses hundreds of updates to its flagship testing and performance profiling software. Phoronix Media has also released PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 (codenamed "Gernlinden"), which is the first Linux-based desktop operating system designed exclusively for carrying out automated tests using the Phoronix Test Suite from a live environment. Phoromatic, a web-based remote test management system, has also entered closed beta testing.

It has been no secret that we have been working to create our own Linux distribution that is designed to run off a Live DVD/USB device and would provide a standardized free software stack for running hardware benchmarks whether you are a computer review web-site like us, an independent hardware vendor interested in seeing how well their hardware performs on Linux, or just a hobbyist wishing to compare your system's performance against that of your friends. We first shared our plans for this a few months ago when talking about driving Linux-based benchmarking with Sandtorg (a.k.a. Phoronix Test Suite 2.0). We also briefly mentioned this Linux OS again last week when providing a detailed guide to Phoronix Test Suite 2.0, but today we are formally announcing PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 (codenamed "Gernlinden"). PTS Desktop Live is being released as a free download in tandem with the release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 on the 4th of August.

While nearly all of Intel's attention is focused on their newer LGA-1366 platform with the high-end Core i7 processors and then the forthcoming Core i5 series, there are still plenty of viable processors left for the LGA-775 motherboards. There are of course a number of different Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, and Core 2 Extreme CPUs on the market, but beyond that Intel's Celeron family does still exist. Most computer enthusiasts simply write off the Celeron products as being too slow, but among the newer Celeron parts there are even some dual-core processors. For a forthcoming article we had picked up an Intel Celeron E1400 for looking at the Linux video decoding performance on a slow system (similar to our HD Video Playback With A $20 CPU & $30 GPU On Linux article), but as we have never published performance results for a dual-core Celeron on Linux, we have decided to get those numbers out there today for those that are interested.

In less than two weeks we will be officially releasing Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 "Sandtorg" and this by far is the biggest upgrade ever to our flagship testing and benchmarking software. While the Phoronix Test Suite is most often associated with Linux, this open-source software is also compatible with Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and BSD operating systems too, all of which offer new improvements with Phoronix Test Suite 2.0. In this article we have detailed some of the major highlights of Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 and how we seek to drive innovation into PC benchmarking and performance profiling.

Yesterday NVIDIA released their first 190.xx Linux beta driver for their GeForce and Quadro graphics cards. The NVIDIA 190.16 Beta driver brought a number of VDPAU fixes, PowerMizer control features, a number of new official and unofficial OpenGL extensions receiving GLX protocol support, and there were a number of other fixes and enhancements too. However, now that we have had a chance to analyze this driver, there is more in store than what the change-log shares regarding this driver. There is in fact support for the unreleased OpenGL 3.2 specification.

With it being a while since we last compared many Linux distributions when it comes to their measurable desktop performance, we decided to run a new round of tests atop four of the most popular Linux distributions: OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mandriva. To see where these Linux distributions are at, we used their latest development releases and then performed all package updates as of 2009-07-15. Following that, we ran an arsenal of tests using the Phoronix Test Suite. Here are the results.

In the past we have published OpenSolaris vs. Linux Kernel benchmarks and similar articles looking at the performance of Sun's OpenSolaris up against popular Linux distributions. We have looked at the performance on high-end AMD workstations, but we have never compared the OpenSolaris and Linux performance on netbooks. Well, not until today. In this article we have results comparing OpenSolaris 2009.06 and Ubuntu 9.04 on the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook.

Since we began benchmarking Btrfs a few months ago we have found it to not deliver any spectacular file-system performance results on Linux. This next-generation Linux file-system that has often been compared to Sun's ZFS has not really performed that well, granted it's still very much under development. Btrfs is far from being the performance king and even its SSD mode has had little positive effect. Just weeks ago we delivered EXT4, Btrfs, and NILFS2 benchmarks, but now there is a new release of Btrfs available. Committed to the Linux 2.6.31 kernel was Btrfs v0.19. Does this release bring any performance improvements? Yes and no.

Over the years we have looked at dozens of ASRock motherboards, and as we have noted in recent reviews, over the past year or so they have really ramped up their efforts on providing feature-rich motherboards while still delivering them at very low prices, as they have long been known for their budget status. Two recent motherboards we had looked at that illustrate this trend is the M3A780GXH/128M and the X58 SuperComputer, both of which motherboards had bolstered a nice set of features, were priced well, and carried other unique advantages. ASRock has not only been focusing upon driving innovation into their motherboards, but now other products too. In conjunction with Pegatron Corp, ASRock has released its first Atom-based nettop computer. We have our hands on this new ASRock NetTop ION 330 product and to say the least it is a wonderful system using Intel's Atom processor with NVIDIA's ION platform.

Recently on our forums, Frank Earl (who goes by the synonym Svartalf), has been seeking the input of Linux gamers as to what games they would like to see ported to Linux. Frank has been working for Linux Game Publishing for a few years porting various titles to Linux and has done work independently on bringing new software from Windows to Linux. Frank was overwhelmed by the response on our forums and it has even led to new Linux games with many other possible ports being looked into. To get his view as where Linux gaming is currently at, he has answered a few of our questions about Linux game porting, Linux gaming in general, and other questions that may be of interest to gamers and Linux enthusiasts.

The past few Linux kernel releases have brought a number of new file-systems to the Linux world, such as with EXT4 having been stabilized in the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, Btrfs being merged into Linux 2.6.29, and most recently the NILFS2 file-system premiering with the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. Other file-systems have been introduced too during the past few Linux kernel release cycles, but these three have been the most talked about and are often looked at as being the next-generation Linux file-systems. Being the benchmarking junkies that we are, we have set out to compare the file-system performance of EXT4, Btrfs, and NILFS2 under Ubuntu using the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. We also looked at how these file-systems compared to EXT3 and XFS.

Back in March we reviewed the System76 Serval Professional Notebook and found it to be an excellent contender at the time. This notebook, which shipped with Ubuntu 8.10, had packed an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor with a GeForce 9800M GTS graphics card and other great hardware, but since then System76 has rolled out notebooks with newer and better hardware. One of the new notebooks to recently leave the System76 facilities is the Bonobo Professional, which packs an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9000 processor and an impressive NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M discrete graphics processor. In this article today we are seeing how this high-end notebook performs with Ubuntu 9.04.

After launching the GeForce 200 series last year, NVIDIA unveiled the GeForce GTX 260M and 280M GPUs for notebook computers earlier this year. The GeForce GTX 280M is currently NVIDIA's fastest notebook GPU, even though it is derived from the GeForce 9800GTX+ core rather than the GTX 280 desktop variant. This 55nm notebook GPU has 128 processing cores, supports two-way SLI, features NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology (important for VDPAU usage under Linux), and other features to pack a desktop performance punch in notebook computers. The Linux-friendly System76 manufacturer recently introduced the Bonobo Professional notebook computer with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M and an Intel Core 2 Quad processor, which we happen to be looking at now and today are delivering some initial performance results from this high-end NVIDIA GPU under Ubuntu Linux.