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Two weeks ago we looked at the Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB from Sapphire Technology and in preparation for the new ATI/AMD Linux display driver coming soon, today we are previewing the ASUS EAH2600PRO 256MB graphics card. This PCI Express graphics card has HDMI output support with HDCP compliance, OpenGL 2.0 support, and its core runs at 600MHz with a 1000MHz memory clock. Distinguishing this graphics card from the reference ATI Radeon HD 2600PRO is claims that this ASUS cooling solution is 20 degrees Celsius cooler than the reference model.

The first beta of KDE 4.0 was released earlier this month and Warren Woodford of the MEPIS project has now built a version of SimplyMEPIS 7 that is based upon Debian Etch with the 32-bit and 64-bit KDE 4.0 Beta 1 packages. With some great work going into version 4 of the K Desktop Environment, we've enclosed some screenshots from this MEPIS testing build.

Thanks to recent commits in the RandR 1.2 branch for the open-source X.Org Radeon driver, it's now possible to use S-Video and composite TV output on your ATI graphics card without any patches. This is not limited to the R200 series but will also work with the R300 series and theoretically any graphics card supported by the xf86-video-ati driver. In this guide have outlined the instructions for enabling TV output support from the Radeon driver git code as well as some of the current limitations.

Last month marked the introduction of Fedora 7 support with the fglrx 8.39.4 ATI/AMD driver but not much more than that was to be found aside from an undocumented XML file. This driver did also present watermark problems that led to the driver being recalled and a corrected driver being pushed out. Today the fglrx 8.40.4 driver has been released and while many had speculated the 8.40 series would mark the introduction of the new Linux driver code-base, that's not the case for 8.40.4 driver. What changes does the 8.40.4 driver hold in store for Linux users? We'll tell you today but there isn't much.

Jerome Glisse and his posse of open-source developers have been making good progress with an open-source "Avivo" graphics driver for the ATI Radeon X1000 (R500) series hardware. However, one roadblock they have hit along the way is with TMDS setting issues on the Radeon X1200, X1300, X1400, and X1900 series. This roadblock had also led to postponing the Avivo 0.1.0 release. Now if you are an ATI R500 owner and have been wondering how you can help with the advancement of this open-source driver, there is a way even without prior development experience and that is by providing VBE mode-setting BIOS dumps. As you have probably never created such dumps before, we have written a brief tutorial on using vbespy/vbetest for the first time.

There is no R600 Linux driver yet, but as we have shared before it is coming later this year. When the Linux support does arrive, we will be delivering same-day Linux benchmarks with a plethora of different graphics cards as well as seeing if the new AMD Linux driver can finally outperform NVIDIA's binary driver and hardware, which for years has been faster under Linux. Among the many graphics cards that we will be using to deliver these initial benchmarks is the Sapphire Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB. In this preview while being stuck with the old driver, we have a few words to say on Sapphire's fastest 512MB GPU aside from what we had shared in our launch-day Radeon HD 2900XT coverage.

There is about two months left until the final release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, but today marks the release of Ubuntu 7.10 Tribe 4. New in this alpha release is GNOME 2.19.6, desktop search capabilities through Tracker, fast user switching support, deskbar applet, OpenOffice.org 2.3, AppArmor by default, and a smooth shutdown splash screen. Next week is the feature freeze, upstream version freeze, and the first artwork deadline for Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.

Last month we looked at the ALiveNF7G-HDReady from ASRock, which was a great budget motherboard that had integrated NVIDIA GeForce 7050 graphics that made it suitable for an HTPC or multimedia setup and it came topped with Gigabit LAN support and IEEE-1394 Firewire. We are back with ASRock today as we look at their ConRoe1333-DVI/H motherboard. ASRock's ConRoe1333-DVI/H is based on Intel's 945G Chipset and is compatible with Intel 1333MHz Core 2 Duo processors, uses GMA 950 graphics, and is home to many more features.

A friendly penguin has told us at Phoronix that Google is looking to team up with OpenMoko for their "gPhone". Google will not be using the FIC Neo1973 GTA01, but they will be bringing the open-source OpenMoko platform to their own hardware.

While the Linux 2.6.23 kernel is only weeks into development, it's already generated quite a bit of attention. From the merging of the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) to the -rc2 kernel being "the new -rc1", the Linux 2.6.23 kernel is certainly in store for being an ornate release. Adding to this attention has been a stable user-space driver API and virtualization improvements (KVM, Xen, and LGuest). With all of this activity surrounding the Linux 2.6.23 kernel we've decided to conduct a handful of benchmarks comparing the Linux 2.6.20, 2.6.21, 2.6.22, and 2.6.23 kernel releases so far.

MEPIS has been making news this week with the return to Debian as the base for its upcoming SimplyMEPIS 7 release. Debian was the MEPIS base prior to their short-lived relationship with Ubuntu on the bottom. Continuing with the news, yesterday afternoon was the first development release to reincorporate the Debian Stable OS core was SimplyMEPIS 6.9.51prebeta. This pre-beta release includes the Linux 2.6.22 kernel, Debian Etch core, KDE 3.5.7, Firefox 2.0.0.5, and OpenOffice.org 2.2.1.

Since publishing our Avivo versus fglrx driver GtkPerf benchmarks that compared the GTK performance between the community open-source driver and ATI's official driver, we have received a number of requests for more of these 2D benchmarks with different graphics cards and different drivers. While this is not one of our formal articles, we have completed a few more GtkPerf tests with NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards to see how the GTK performance stacks up.

It has been a while since we last reviewed an ASRock motherboard, but this budget manufacturer has kept churning out new and more innovative products. The ASRock motherboard we have our hands on for this Linux and Solaris review is the ALiveNF7G-HDready, which combines NVIDIA's GeForce 7050 and nForce 630a MCP with a wealth of integrated extras such as IEEE-1394a Firewire to offer a rather good package for its low price. This motherboard is also capable of handling 720p H.264 video playback with low CPU Utilization and HDCP decoding -- with supported software.

If you have been reading our ATI/AMD Linux display driver reviews for some time, you will know that there are periods where it doesn't look like the fglrx driver is actively being worked on, but in fact changes are being made "under the hood". We are going through one of these droughts right now where not many new features or bug fixes are being introduced, though a lot of work is going on internally. We have decided to dissect the last 19 months of driver releases from ATI/AMD to expose some interesting facts and what should be coming in the future.

A few months back we looked at the Gigabyte GeForce 8500GT 256MB graphics card, which was a factory-overclocked $100 graphics card from Gigabyte that came topped with a passively cooled copper heatsink. Today we are back with Gigabyte as we look at their step-up from the 8500GT, which is the 8600GT GV-NX86T256D.

Starting out the first-ever Ubuntu Live 2007 conference was Mark Shuttleworth's keynote followed by Stephen O'Grady and Jeff Waugh. The day was broken up into a variety of sessions from the deployment of an open-source model at Purdue-Fort Wayne to building cross-OS applications on Linux. Starting off the day was the announcements of Canonical Landscape for system monitoring and management and Ubuntu 8.04 being a Long Term Support (LTS) release. The day had ended with free food and drinks along with some entertainment and other fun. The Ubuntu Live 2007 conference is being put on by Canonical and O'Reilly in Portland, Oregon this week prior to the start of OSCON 2007. Phoronix served as media partners with O'Reilly for this event.

Yesterday's release of OpenSuSE 10.3 Alpha 6 marks the first time there is a single installation CD for OpenSuSE, but also added in this development build is the Linux 2.6.22 kernel, GCC 4.2, and other updated packages. The single CD was possible by splitting packages and also introduced was 64-bit CDs for KDE and GNOME. While this isn't the final build of OpenSuSE 10.3, we have enclosed new screenshots of the OpenSuSE 10.3 Alpha 6 GNOME edition.

When it comes to binary display drivers under Linux, NVIDIA is generally known as the company that's able to offer drivers that are on par with their Windows driver. Unlike the known performance issues with the ATI/AMD fglrx driver where it's not uncommon for the driver to be 50% slower than the Windows Catalyst equivalent, the NVIDIA Linux driver has performed roughly the same if not faster in some cases. This has also been true for the NVIDIA Solaris driver as the performance bastion can largely be attributed to the shared driver code-base between all NVIDIA-supported platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD).

Sabayon Linux has released a "business edition" of its popular LiveDVD distribution known for its use of desktop accelerated effects and being based upon Gentoo. Sabayon Linux 1.0 Business Edition ships without the eye candy and games and is for when art meets business. This business edition ships with an optimized server profile, the Linux 2.6.22 kernel, and the latest proprietary display drivers. An easy firewall management package, KMyFirewall, has also been included.

While the Avivo driver doesn't yet contain 3D functionality or support a number of features found in the official fglrx driver and the community Radeon driver, it is making steady progress despite its age. Most recently with the open-source R500 driver implementing shadow frame-buffer support, we have experienced a noticeable increase in performance. As we have begun to receive messages from those interested in this driver wondering about the performance capabilities, we have carried out a brief GtkPerf test comparing the Avivo git code to ATI's official binary "fglrx" display driver.