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The GeForce 8500GT is NVIDIA's value-priced contender in the GeForce 8 series. The 8500GT has a 450MHz core clock and 400MHz memory clock, but how is this $100 creation able to compete against other graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA? We have our hands on the passively-cooled Gigabyte GeForce 8500GT 256MB graphics card and have run our usual Linux graphics tests along with some of our first overclocking attempts with this new solution. Without further ado, we present the world's first Linux benchmarks of the NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT.

Don't get me wrong, Fedora is an excellent distribution but it seems to be losing some of its speed. I will still likely use Fedora 7 on a number of personal machines in hopes that Fedora 8 rebounds, but I certainly have been tempted to install Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn.

As was outlined in a previous Phoronix article, we have been evaluating KateOS as a possible Linux distribution to append to our arsenal of OS compatibility tests. Recently KateOS 3.6 Beta was introduced and we have went over this distribution with a fine tooth comb. KateOS 3.6 Beta is a huge improvement for the KateOS team with the improvements to the LiveCD as well as for the installation process. Shipping with this beta is everything from OpenOffice.org to Xine, making it a viable desktop distribution powered by Xfce.

Making up Zenwalk Live 4.4.1 is the new ZenPanel utility for system administration, a complete development suite, and a variety of new games such as Mega Mario, Frozen Bubble, and LBreakout. Zenwalk Live is a LiveCD distribution that ships with Xfce 4 so that you may try out Zenwalk without even touching your hard drive.

We have been waiting and waiting for NVIDIA to release their new Linux display drivers and today we can report that they finally did. Sneaking out of the NVIDIA camp on Friday night was the 100.14.03 Beta driver for Linux. However, at this time there is no 100.14.03 equivalent for FreeBSD or Solaris users.

Our primary focus at Phoronix has been and will remain on covering the GNU/Linux hardware scene; however, the Solaris OS will become standard for use in a majority of our reviews and other hardware articles. We have been monitoring the Solaris landscape for quite some time and we see today's adoption as an important milestone for Solaris desktop users and the alternative operating system community in general. Our goal is to provide Solaris users with the most detailed information when it comes to compatibility and performance for desktop and server hardware.

While not marked in the official release notes, there have been some "under the hood" changes with the fglrx 8.36 driver. In this driver are two new files: esut.a and glesx.so. These are new X.Org modules for the fglrx driver and specifically involve TexturedVideo and OpenGL ES. The changes that stem from this should be very interesting and when the time comes for its implementation we will be sure to share all of the details.

When I heard a sharp and continuous beeping sound, I had just grabbed my mug to enjoy my evening tea with the movie I was trying to watch. Without asking any questions to my computer (implicitly or explicitly), I had put down the mug and reached for the reset button on my PC. This was the third time in 45 minutes and it had never happened before. After I had upgraded to a ATI Radeon X1650XT, things started to go awry in a very annoying fashion.

We've heard a lot about the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project, which aims to provide a $100 laptop for developing nations, and we've heard a bit about its Sugar interface and other technical abilities, but recently we spent the time with QEMU and a test build of the OLPC XO operating system (Fedora based) to see how it really shapes up.

For those new to Linux or the yet to be converts, Cedega is an application that emulates Microsoft's DirectX and allows the user to play a variety of games within Linux that otherwise wouldn't be possible. While Cedega is not completely open-source and requires a monthly subscription, it is based upon WINE. WINE supports a variety of games but isn't designed solely for gaming and often lacks support for some of the newer DirectX titles. In this article we compared the gaming performance of Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows Vista, Linux, Linux with WINE, and Linux with Cedega 6.0.

With the release of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn happening in just a matter of days, last month at Phoronix we had presented The Visual History of Ubuntu. In that article we went back and looked at all Ubuntu releases to date to see how it has evolved over time both when it comes to the interface as well as the changes that had made up each release. Today we are doing the same for Fedora as we look back upon its history.

With the release of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn happening in just a matter of days, last month at Phoronix we had presented The Visual History of Ubuntu. In that article we went back and looked at all Ubuntu releases to date to see how it has evolved over time both when it comes to the interface as well as the changes that had made up each release. Today we are doing the same for Fedora as we look back upon its history.

While id Software and Epic Games are among the few major companies that are Linux gaming patrons, if you've been wanting to play such games as Battlefield 2142 or Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, you will now be able to do so starting April 14! Next week Transgaming will be introducing Cedega 6.0 "Swordfish". Among the features are increased performance, usability improvements, and a horde of new games support. Phoronix was fortunate enough to receive an advanced media release copy of Cedega 6.0 and today we will be just hitting the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all of the changes that make up this release.

When it comes to overclocking ATI Radeon graphics cards under Linux the only real option has been using rovclock. Rovclock is a Radeon overclocking utility written and developed by Sebastian Witt. This tool has been in development since 2005 but it took quite a while before the Radeon R300/R400 series was even supported. Rovclock still lacks support for the Radeon X1000 (R500) series, however, there is a new contender to the ATI Linux GPU overclocking arena and that is ATIpower. We have covered the ATIpower overclocking utility today at Phoronix.

For months now Radeon/FireGL owners have been wondering whether or not ATI Technologies / Advanced Micro Devices is actively working on AIGLX support for their official drivers or whether they will even support it with their binary fglrx drivers. It has now been longer for ATI to add support for AIGLX than it took them for official Radeon X1000 product support, which also received a great deal of negative scrutiny for the belated product support.

Fedora 7 Test 3 was released to mirrors this morning for both the Live and Prime editions and both KDE and GNOME versions. There is still a final test release before Fedora 7 final in May, but this test release marks the merge of Fedora Core and Extras, GNOME 2.18.0, the new Echo icon theme, fast user switching, and a 2.6.21-rc5 based kernel. In this article you can find screenshots of Fedora 7 Test 3 Live.

Yesterday in the forums I created a thread called Hello Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition! with the AMD 8.35.5 Linux drivers, but will Hello AIGLX! be the next big announcement?

Ch-ch-ch-changes... Not expecting to hear that with today's driver release? Well, we had not expected much improvement for the March ATI Catalyst Linux driver either until we saw the driver first hand. Today's 8.35.5 release has implemented one major change: a new Catalyst Control Center! AMD is eliminating the fireglcontrolpanel in favor of the brand new AMD Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition. In this review we will be looking at the new 8.35.5 display driver along with taking a very close look at this much improved control area.

In less than three weeks it will have been a year since ATI Technologies had added it's Radeon X1000 family (R500) support to their Linux binary drivers. When that support was finally added it came about six months after the hardware was actually introduced to the public accompanied by the Windows Catalyst drivers. Even with this six months time that developers had to work on the Linux package, the fglrx v8.24.8 driver (the version that had introduced R500 support) resulted in ATI's flagship GPU series facing a miserable beating by NVIDIA's 7800GTX and even the GeForce 6800GT. However, a year later and what will be twelve driver releases with R500 support, how does the performance now compare? In this article we will be comparing several R500 parts to see how the performance stacks up using the latest driver.

If you're still searching for the perfect mate, I would definitely recommend checking out SAM. If you're just new to this alternative operating system world or are trying to turn someone onto Linux, SAM Linux 2007 is terrific for showcasing the awesome possibilities of a desktop. With SAM being available on a LiveCD, there really is no reason not to check it out.