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For years now we have been accustom to seeing Tyan motherboards in some of the best workstations and servers, but recently they have been introducing a couple FlexATX/microATX motherboards. The first microATX Tyan motherboard we had reviewed was the Tomcat i845GV S3098, which was about two years ago, while earlier this year we featured a preview of the Tomcat i945GM S3095. Now in hand today we will be reviewing the Tyan Toledo i965R S5180. The Toledo i965R is a FlexATX solution with an LGA-775 socket, one PCI Express x16 slot, two DDR2 sockets, and is powered by Intel's Q965 + ICH8 Chipset. The Tyan i965R motherboard also supports Intel's Core 2 Duo processors.

One of the major changes mentioned in yesterday's release announcement for the Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Beta was "excellent wireless networking support". As I haven't yet blogged about the 802.11abg WiFi support in Feisty Fawn nor has it been covered on Phoronix, I decided to talk about it now with the Feisty Fawn beta release. For today's purposes I had loaded up Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn beta on a Lenovo ThinkPad T60, which has an integrated Intel 3945 wireless connection. I also had inserted a NetGear PCMCIA card, which at heart is an Atheros 802.11g Chipset.

The second release candidate for SimplyMEPIS 6.5 is now available. SimplyMEPIS 6.5 RC2 replaces QtParted with GParted, improvements to the MEPIS Xconfig assistant, and a fair amount of other changes beyond the original release candidate. SimplyMEPIS is another Ubuntu-based distribution.

Many Linux users have expressed concern over ATI's Catalyst Linux drivers for various reasons, but most of these users seem to be taking the wrong approach. These users express their disapproval and seek improvements by flaming on forums, forming petitions, bombarding the BugZilla, and using the ATI feedback form. However, this isn't really effective. On Michael's Phoronix web-blog he has outlined some strategies for actively engaging ATI/AMD's OEM/ODM/AIB partners in seeking Linux display driver improvements. He also states that at least one major OEM is interested in improved Linux drivers, but they are afraid of adverse effects to the Windows Catalyst drivers.

Sabayon Linux, a LiveDVD distribution known for being based upon Gentoo and its inclusion of desktop eye-candy such as Beryl and XGL, has reached version 3.3. New in this Sabayon release is the Linux 2.6.20 kernel, X.Org 7.2 with AIGLX and Composite support, Beryl 0.2.0-rc2, updated NVIDIA and ATI drivers, and much more.

If you had missed my original blog entry, migration-assistant is automatically run during the Ubuntu installation process from its LiveCD. Microsoft Windows is not the only operating system supported, but you can automatically transport the files and settings from a previous Ubuntu installation or other Linux distributions. I have detailed the workings of migration-assistant a lot more in my original post. A working copy of migration-assistant is available through the daily LiveCD builds of Ubuntu and will also be available in the beta release of Ubuntu 7.04.

On the ATI/AMD section of the forums there continues to be confusion among some readers and contributors over the legacy drivers along with Beryl support by ATI/AMD. Beyond what I have said in the forums, below are some additional statements.

While Debian has been around for over a decade, Gentoo for five years, and Mandriva/Mandrake for nearly nine years, in less than three years of existence Ubuntu has received the most attention and generated the greatest amount of publicity in the Linux limelight. Why is that? In this article we will be taking a look back at all of the Ubuntu releases to date and exploring how this Linux distribution has evolved so quickly over its short lifespan.

Yesterday GNOME 2.18.0 was released, and while it will be included with Fedora 7 Test 3 later this month (it will also be in the next Ubuntu Feisty Fawn test release), I couldn't help but to upgrade a few Fedora boxes immediately. Initially I had tried using GARNOME, but this time around with 2.18.0 it was pouting over SELinux's avc.h on the first Rawhide system I tried. However, many of the GNOME 2.18.0 packages are already available through Rawhide, so I proceeded to take that route with updating all of the GNOME packages this morning.

The goal of Ubuntu's Easy Business Server is to provide a simple and clean web interface so that small business owners can easily setup an Ubuntu-powered server with little or no Linux/server administration experience.

Today marks the release of GNOME 2.18.0, and to commemorate today's release we have posted some screenshots from the Foresight LiveCD 2.17.92 GNOME Release Candidate, which is designed to be a demo GNOME LiveCD. This is also Foresight's first attempt at creating a bootable CD image.

With the switch to an Ubuntu base, development of Freespire 2.0 has restarted. The first alpha release of Freespire 2.0 is now available for download and we had decided to check it out for ourselves. Freespire 2.0 Alpha 1 utilizes the Linux 2.6.20 kernel, X.Org 7.2, KDE 3.5.6, and all of the other latest packages. However. for the Freespire team there remains a great deal of work ahead before we shall see Freespire 2.0 final.

While not our primary focus at Phoronix, in the past we had reviewed the Acer AL1714CB, AL1732 Prestige, and dual AL1715b LCD monitors. Even though Acer's LCDs are not nearly as popular as those from Dell are, we have been very fond of the models that we had looked at in the past. Being nearly a year since we looked at the AL1732 Prestige, which was a phenomenal display, we once again chased down another new Acer monitor. In this review we will be looking at the Acer AL2223Wd Office Line 22" LCD monitor. The Acer AL2223Wd monitor has a recommended resolution of 1680 x 1050 with its WSXGA+ screen and the viewing angles are 160 degrees for both horizontal and vertical. Other specifications include a 300cd/m2 brightness, 800:1 contrast ratio, and 5ms response time. Both VGA and DVI are supported. For what it's worth, this display is also Windows Vista certified.

This morning NVIDIA released a new Linux display driver. While this driver was not the Linux 100.XX.XX driver that was expected, it was a minor update to append support for the new Quadro graphics cards. In addition, GeForce 8800 series SLI is now supported.

We have compared the 32-bit and 64-bit performance of Ubuntu and started a performance comparison of Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, but how does the performance of the upcoming Feisty Fawn release compare to that of Fedora 7? In this article we have enclosed benchmarks from Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft, Fedora 7 Test 2, and Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 5. In gaming and desktop benchmarks, which of these Linux distributions is faster? We hope to answer that question today.

This migration-assistant will be found in Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn and makes it easier to move your documents and settings over to Ubuntu from other operating systems. Switching Linux distributions can be a pain, but switching from Windows to Linux can be a disaster for most people. The Ubuntu migration-assistant hopes to lessen this impact by making the transfer of settings and files MUCH easier.

Today I heard from Daniel Stone who is one of the people working on the R500 reverse engineering. At this point they are still in the early stages of this new driver but within a few weeks they hope the register dumps will become useful...

For those running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (well, once it's out), the EPEL repository has opened this past Friday. EPEL, or Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux, is an RPM repository similar to the Fedora Extras project for community-built packages.

Three months of development has created SIDUX 2007-01, which is now available for download. New in this ex-KANOTIX developer release is a rewritten distribution framework, further efforts dealing with hardware support/detection, and lite and full editions of SIDUX. Check it out at Phoronix.

[I just downloaded and burned a CD if Sidux, I will be putting it on my Duel Boot macine in the next week or so, I'll tell you all how it goes. - Scott]

Fedora 7 Test 2 is being pushed out the door this Tuesday (February 27), but thanks to the excellence of Pungi we decided to run our own spin. New in Fedora 7 Test 2 is the artwork along with quite a few other changes that we commented on in our Fedora 7 Preview earlier this year. In this article we have some of the first screenshots from Fedora 7 Test 2. To say the least, Fedora 7 is shaping up extremely well!