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In its battle against NVIDIA's Kepler, yesterday AMD released the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz graphics card. Here's some thoughts from a Linux perspective...

In the last seven days: RHEL 6.3 arrived, Google donated $300,000 to the OSU Open Source Lab, and Linus Torvalds told NVIDIA what he really thinks. Also, Glyn Moody examined privacy concerns and open source mapping, and Eberhard Wolff looked at the new Vert.x web framework

HTC is on its fourth incarnation of Sense, and in my opinion, no one has come close. In fact, they've got nowhere near. However, a browse around the Play Store will uncover downloadable themes, sets of widgets and UIs, one of which is HD Widgets Beta from Cloud TV.

Google has updated its Android Developers site and will be giving developers the ability to respond to reviews in the Play store. Meanwhile, it seems that "Jelly Bean" will be the code name for Android 4.1

Two weeks after the Wine 1.5.6 development release where they began work on a Direct3D shader compiler, Wine 1.5.7 now brings several more features for running your Windows binaries on Linux and other platforms...

Game developer Wooga has released its Magic Land Island project as open source code. The game was intended to demonstrate the capabilities of HTML5, but it ultimately only met some of the developers' expectations

An idea is being kicked around within the forums about sponsoring open-source driver development for one dollar per day...

NVIDIA has lost an order of at least ten million graphics cards because their GeForce/Quadro driver is closed-source...

Before Apple releases Mac OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion" next month, here's a look at how the latest point release of Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" is performing compared to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" and the latest development snapshot of Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" Linux.

There's work under-way on implementing input method support for Wayland that was spawned by an earlier proposal...

It's not only NVIDIA with Linux problems that cause upstream developers to publicly bash companies, but AMD has come under scrutiny too. The developers of the popular cross-platform XBMC multimedia project shared a little story about enthusiasm, hope, and disappointment. In this guest posting by Peter Fruhberger on Phoronix, XvBA is what is principally talked about, which is AMD's lead choice for video acceleration when using their proprietary Catalyst driver. Unfortunately the XBMC developers aren't too happy about the state of video acceleration using AMD's Catalyst driver for Radeon graphics hardware, hence why they have reached out to Phoronix with this rather lengthy public message. Whether AMD even cares about Linux users and when XvBA will support missing functionality are among their open questions for AMD.

Adobe wants people to know about the work it does in web standards and open source projects and has now created a web site to document that work

Based on Android 2.3.7 "Gingerbread", version 7.2 of the CyanogenMod Project's popular modified firmware for Android devices adds several new features, including some that have been backported from version 4.0 of Android "Ice Cream Sandwich"

Here's an interesting finding: at least when running under Wine, Half-Life 2 is faster on the open-source AMD Radeon Linux driver than when running on the proprietary Catalyst driver. There are also some other similar results where these Windows games have the advantage when running on the Gallium3D open-source driver.

The US digital rights advocacy organisation has launched a new patent reform project aimed at promoting seven suggested "fixes" for the American patent system, including one which questions whether software patents are even necessary

No matter how much you change your desktop background image and switch distro themes, staring at the same computer's screen day in and day out can become humdrum. Conky can be used to decorate the desktop in endless ways and provide a stream of useful system monitors in the process.

The general availability release of Fedora 17 "Beefy Miracle" for ARM hardware is now available...

In the discussion last night about AMD not having any plans to suspend their proprietary Linux driver, John Bridgman of AMD shared some interesting information about AMD planning to provide a full execution stack in open-source form...

It seems natural enough that SUSE Linux and SAP would be technical allies; both hail from Germany and both try to peddle business-grade software to enterprises. SAP, which has a huge installed base of Windows customers and a considerable number of Unix customers, cannot be seen to be playing favorites with its OS suppliers just because of nationalism. But it cannot stop – and would not stop – SUSE Linux, the commercial Linux distributor now owned by Attachmate, from making optimizations to its OS stack that make SAP apps run better.

Things appear to be moving along nicely in the Linux cabal at Valve Software as they work to enable Steam and the Source Engine on the Linux desktop. Here's another one of the new tenured Linux developers that will be starting soon.