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Last week we had published The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux, and to no real surprise, the feedback ranged from beliefs that it was propaganda to others being grateful that AMD finally shared some additional information with their Linux customers about the fglrx development cycle. While the article was far from being propaganda, what had outraged a number of open-source developers were AMD's comments on the R200 support or there the lack of. In this article, we have a few additional comments to share along with what some open-source developers had to say about AMD's information.

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn has been out for less than two months but tomorrow we will see the first alpha (or in this case it's called a "Tribe") release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. We used the daily build of Ubuntu and Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon to do some exploring prior to the release of Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 1 tomorrow morning. While there is still many changes that will come prior to the October release of Gutsy, things are looking good for the Ubuntu camp this fall.

With more and more people assembling MythTV boxes as alternatives to Windows Media Center or going out and buying a TiVO, for this introductory article we will share some recommendations of hardware we had used on a recent MythTV build along with other information to consider when building your next home theater PC.

Last year when AMD announced their acquisition of ATI it led many to wonder how this would impact the quality of their Linux support and driver. Some had even speculated that AMD would be opening the code to at least a subset of their graphics drivers, and while this issue has come up again more recently, we will cover this particular topic in a different article. In this article we will be exposing what truly consists of the ATI/AMD driver development cycle and ultimately what they are really doing to improve their image in the Linux community. We have been granted unprecedented access to share with you their once unknown driver development model.

Mark Shuttleworth has flown into space on a Soyuz TM-34 and founded Thawte Consulting that later sold to Verisign for over $500 million, but he is now known most for being the founder and leader of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. In addition to Ubuntu he also established HBD Venture Capital and is involved with several other free software projects. Earlier today we had spoke with Mark Shuttleworth to discuss the latest happenings in the Ubuntu world including Dell shipping Ubuntu PCs, getting open-source drivers from hardware vendors, and what is coming down the road for Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.

Yesterday we covered the graphics hardware needed to handle Beryl and on the heels of that article we are taking a quick look at another Linux versus Windows comparison for the official ATI/AMD graphics drivers. NVIDIA's Linux and Windows drivers perform about the same and in some instances the Linux binary driver even running faster, but as we have been sharing now for many months the Linux fglrx driver is handicapped for performance. Has things since improved for ATI? Well, as you'll see in this article by using the official Linux driver from ATI/AMD you can expect your frame-rate to be cut in half compared to the most recent version of the Windows Catalyst driver.

We thought it was already clear what graphics processors and drivers work and don't work with Linux desktop eye candy such as Beryl and Compiz, but it seems based upon the number of e-mails we have been receiving along with messages in community bulletin boards that the line isn't so clear after all. For those that have never tried out Beryl, it is a compositing window manager branched from Compiz (though Beryl will merge back with Compiz soon) that provides a variety of window decorations and other desktop "eye candy" for X.Org users. In this article we hope to make it clear for you what GPUs will make your Linux desktop look the most pleasurable and what ones just sweat thinking about these desktop effects.

Elitegroup Computer Systems is known for their array of products from desktop computers to graphics cards and motherboards. At hand today we have their NF650iSLIT-A motherboard, which is powered by NVIDIA's nForce 650i Chipset and caters toward the computer enthusiast crowd, but can it really deliver?

The ASUS P5N-E SLI motherboard rings in at about $130 USD, which makes it substantially cheaper than many of the NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI motherboards on the market and even some of the nForce 650i motherboards. While this motherboard may be affordable, does it deliver upon the ASUS quality and innovations that enthusiasts have come to expect from their cutting edge products? Well, some of its many features include Intel Quad-Core support, NVIDIA SLI, and HD Azalia Audio.

It was exactly one month ago that NVIDIA had delivered the 100.14.03 display driver and today we are reporting on yet another new beta driver in the 100.14.xx series. This time around we have our hands on the NVIDIA 100.14.06 graphics driver, which offers improved notebook support and fixes a variety of minor bugs.

The last time we had looked at the performance of Intel's integrated graphics under Linux with their open-source driver was back in February when testing the GMA 3000 IGP using an Intel DQ965GFEKR motherboard. However, with display drivers constantly improving, we recently carried out some additional Intel Q965 graphics tests along with comparing these numbers to discrete graphics solutions from AMD/ATI and NVIDIA.

If you were hoping to use a Creative X-Fi series sound card under Linux in the near future, think again. As according to Creative Labs, it was harder for them to make Microsoft Vista drivers than expected thus it took longer for them to complete. Now the X-Fi Linux drivers with EAX support have been delayed until at least the end of the year.

GNOME 2.19.2 is the second of nine development releases leading up to GNOME 2.20.0, which is due out this September. GNOME 2.19.2 is being released today and for those of you interested in the latest changes to GNOME, we have included some screenshots taken from GNOME 2.19.2 built this afternoon with GARNOME. In the process of trying out this latest desktop environment we had run into several crashes and bugs -- GNOME 2.19.2 is not for those new to Linux.

Ubuntu Studio is an Ubuntu incarnation that focuses on software packages for the multimedia creation crowd. Found in Ubuntu Studio 7.04 are a horde of packages for graphic, video, and audio editing. The Ubuntu Studio theme has went black in a radical turn away from the traditional Ubuntu orange. If you are into multimedia editing and mastering, Ubuntu Studio is definitely worth checking out. In Ubuntu 7.10 all of the Ubuntu Studio packages should be available in the main Canonical repository.

XGI Technology is still in business, but what has happened to them? We once saw hope in them for providing discrete graphics processors to take on the NVIDIA and ATI duopoly, but they have since discontinued their Volari 8 series. While they're no longer producing these desktop chips, they remain an active player in the server and embedded graphics industry -- accompanied by their open-source driver

It's late, but it's finally here. This morning AMD will be formally announcing their long-awaited Radeon HD 2000 series, or perhaps better known as the ATI R600 GPU. The AMD Radeon HD 2000 series features DirectX 10.0 (well, for those that use Microsoft products), Avivo HD, a programmable tessellation unit, CrossFire support, and much more. This morning we have our technology preview of ATI/AMD's next generation GPUs along with what's in store for Linux and the R600 series support.

Since late last year the open-source Linux community has been ecstatic about the growing progress made by the Nouveau developers. Nouveau is an X.Org and FreeDesktop.org project for developing an open-source 2D/3D display driver for NVIDIA graphics cards. With NVIDIA Corporation not providing hardware specifications, this driver is being written through reverse-engineering NVIDIA's binary display driver. While the developers of Nouveau are making great strides and this driver is taking shape, the open-source ATI driver must not be forgotten.

It was back in February that we originally looked at the AB9 motherboard from Abit; however, this P965 motherboard had a few problems that had prevented this motherboard from functioning well with Linux. But have things since improved for this motherboard? We now have our compatibility report for the Abit AB9 as we see if things have changed for the better or worse under Linux and Solaris.

From a KDE SVN trunk snapshot on 04-18-07, we have a few KDE 4.0 screenshots to pass along today. Mind you that KDE 4.0 will not be released until later this year, but if you are interested in seeing how this desktop environment is shaping up, you can see for yourself today.

We've been meaning to deliver benchmarks from the Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 for some time now, but with the new site, the upcoming Solaris hardware support, quad/octal core benchmarking, and the variety of different articles we have been working on, things have been quite hectic around here. However, with Fedora 7 Test 4 now being available, we have finally published our Core 2 Duo E6400 Linux results.