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Fedora Core 6 was released on October 24, 2006 and scheduled to come out a half-year later is the seventh major release for the Fedora Project. However, unlike Yarrow, Tettnang, Heidelberg, Stentz, Bordeaux, and Zod, Fedora 7 is shaping up to be the most ambitious release yet. With all the work and reform going into Fedora 7 it poses the question, will Fedora 7 be Linux's knight in shining armor?

A few months back we had looked at the Abit AW9D i975X motherboard, which was one of the first motherboards to come out of the Universal Abit camp. We had found this Intel flagship motherboard to be very competitive and offer a great deal of features even though it was not able to pack the equivalent punch of the legendary IC7-MAX3 or NF7-S v2.0. What we have on the table to look at today is the Abit NF-M2 nView. The NF-M2 nView is an AM2 motherboard that is powered by the NVIDIA GeForce 6150 with nForce 430 that offers both onboard DVI and VGA support along with 7.1 channel HD audio, Abit Silent OTES, and IEEE-1394a Firewire.

A new month, a new set of display drivers. Coming out of the AMD camp today is Catalyst 7.1 and fglrx 8.33.6. There are a few noteworthy changes in this ATI Linux driver release, which is what we have detailed in this article along with our usual set of graphics benchmarks. This Linux driver is also the first that provides preliminary support for the Radeon X2000 R600 series for both notebook and desktop components.

For only being a release candidate the Linux 2.6.20 kernel has already generated quite a bit of attention. On top of adding asynchronous SCSI scanning, multi-threaded USB probing, and many driver updates, the Linux 2.6.20 kernel will include a full virtualization solution. Kernel-based Virtual Machine is a GPL software project that has been developed and sponsored by Qumranet. In this article we are offering a brief overview of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine for Linux as well as offering up in-house performance numbers as we compare KVM to other virtualization solutions such as QEMU Accelerator and Xen.

The ASUS P5B Deluxe supports Intel's latest Core 2 processors as well as being backwards compatible with the Pentium and Celeron series. This motherboard also features an eight-phase power design, fan-less motherboard cooling, and many more ASUS innovations.

With the great deal of articles that we publish in regards to NVIDIA and ATI display drivers, it is very evident that at this time NVIDIA has the lead when it comes to the frame-rate performance -- with their Linux drivers performing nearly the same as their Windows ForceWare counterpart. ATI has been struggling to improve the performance of their fglrx drivers, and while they had made strides last year, they still have a great deal of work ahead of them. However, one of the areas that often is not mentioned in Phoronix articles is the image quality between ATI and NVIDIA's hardware with their respective drivers. In this article today we will be looking at both company's image quality under Linux in video playback and gaming environments.

It has been one year to the day since XGI Technology had last released a Volari Linux display driver and about 14 months since we had first delivered word of XGI considering open-source 3D display drivers. Where do things now stand for XGI Technology? We will tell you all of the details today where things are for this Taiwan graphics company.

While 64-bit support is now considered common for both Intel and AMD processors, many Linux (as well as Windows) users are uncertain whether to use a 32-bit or 64-bit operating system with there being advantages for both paths. With this being the last Phoronix article for 2006, we decided to take this opportunity to look at the common question of whether to use 32-bit or 64-bit software. In this article, we will be comparing the i386 and x86_64 performance with Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft and Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Herd 1 to see how the numbers truly stack up.

Nouveau is a community project that is working on producing open-source 3D display drivers for NVIDIA's graphics cards. Nouveau is not affiliated with NVIDIA Corporation and is an X.Org Foundation project. While this project is still far from being completed, for this holiday special we are sharing some of our first thoughts on this project from our experience thus far. We would like to make it very clear, however, that the Nouveau driver is no where near completed and still has a great deal of work ahead for the 3D component. This article today will also hopefully shed some light on the advancements of this project so far.

After running 120 tests using ten benchmarks and the twelve ATI display drivers that were released in 2006, our ATI A Year in Review has been completed! In this article we delve into how ATI has affected the Linux community this year, and how they are actively working on improving their image and support. But what direction is ATI/AMD headed in for 2007? We answer all of these questions and share a lot more exclusive information in our Phoronix ATI/AMD AYiR 2006 review.

Last month Intel Corporation had announced their Kentsfield and Clovertown processors. The Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad QX6700 was the first processor (and only one at this time) based upon the quad-core Kentsfield. Meanwhile Intel had introduced the Clovertown Xeon 5300 series at Super Computing 2006. With the two Clovertown quad-core processors in hand, we had delivered our launch-day preview back on November 14. The motherboard we had used for those tests, as well as to test the Xeon 5000 and 5100 series, was the Tyan Tempest i5000XT S2696. Now having spent nearly a month with this flagship motherboard we have a few thoughts to share about this Xeon creation.

While ATI had learned its lesson from the belated Radeon X1000 Linux support, the fglrx driver support for the X1950PRO was not added in October or even November of this year, but the drivers will finally be making their way out this month. We are fortunate enough to have these drivers in hand today, so this article will also serve as the world's first look at the Radeon X1950PRO under Linux. The X1950PRO is designed to be a midrange high-performance graphics card that sells for under $200 USD.

This year is quickly coming to a close and we are here again with what has become a yearly ritual for Phoronix. Time and time again with each NVIDIA and ATI Linux driver release we thoroughly examine the change-log as well as dissecting the performance changes through our rigorous benchmarking process. Now for this article we are retesting all of the major display drivers released this year to see how they compare as a whole and commenting on some of the most prominent advancements made throughout the year. In this article we will be examining the NVIDIA proprietary display drivers. Our ATI A Year in Review article will be published later this month after the 8.32 fglrx driver release. Without further ado, we present the NVIDIA AYiR 2006!

On November 2, 2006 the embargo for Intel's Core 2 Extreme Quad QX6700 was lifted which resulted in a slurry of reviews covering this flagship desktop processor. However, this morning happens to be an important date for Supercomputing 2006 and it serves as yet another milestone for Intel Corporation. This morning Intel will be introducing the Xeon 5300 series, or perhaps better known by its codename of Clovertown. At Phoronix we have had these processors in-house for over a week now and today are able to share our thoughts on these quad-core server/workstation processors as we test them under GNU/Linux.