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It was just a month ago that the open-source Avivo driver for the ATI Radeon X1000 (R500) series was introduced to the public, but in this time we've seen some great progress made. This open-source R500 driver now contains RandR 1.2 support, support for a variety of R500 graphics cards, and most recently support for Shadow Framebuffer was added. The Avivo driver still isn't comparable when it comes to the features found in the fglrx driver or even the open-source Radeon driver for the R200/300/400 series, but it's a work in progress. If you are running into problems with the fglrx driver, stuck using the VESA driver for one reason or another, or just want to get rid of the binary blob and experiment with this open-source driver, we have written a guide for setting up the Avivo driver from source on Ubuntu.

Thanks to the power of GARNOME, this afternoon we decided to take a look at GNOME 2.19.5, which was released this past Wednesday. GNOME 2.19.5 is the fifth development release in the road to GNOME 2.20, which will arrive this September. Among the bits of the GNOME desktop with new features in this release include Eye of GNOME, Evince, Evolution, GDM, gedit, and many other packages.

It was earlier this month that version 2.1.0 of the xf86-video-intel driver was released, which among other things had introduced open-source Linux graphics support for the G33, Q33, and Q35 chipsets as well as fixing a horde of bugs and adding PCI IDs for the 945GME, 965GME, and 965GLE chips. As our last Intel graphics performance article was looking at the Q965 back in May, in this article we have enclosed some benchmarks from Intel's GMA 950 IGP using the new xf86-video-intel 2.1.0 driver.

Since January of this year we have been telling you that AMD has been silently working on R600 (Radeon HD 2000) support for their proprietary Linux "fglrx" driver. However, for the end-user the support isn't complete and still equates to being useless. But how does the recently announced Avivo R500 driver function with the newer R600 series? We have tried out an RV610 GPU in several configurations under Linux, and in this article we will tell you what works and what doesn't right now for the Radeon HD 2000 series.

CentOS, the popular community Linux distribution based upon Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has been at version 5.0 since April of this year, but joining the CentOS 5.0 fleet today is the LiveCD. The CentOS 5.0 LiveCD is based upon CentOS 5.0 i386 and can work out to be a modest Linux workstation or recovery distribution. Included with this new Linux LiveCD is OpenOffice.org 2.0.4, GNOME 2.16, GAIM 2.0.0, and Thunderbird 1.5. While this isn't a great Linux desktop distribution, if you're after a workstation or recovery-oriented distribution, the CentOS 5.0 LiveCD looks great.

The NVIDIA GeForce 6100 and 6150 integrated graphics processors have been relatively popular among Linux and Windows users. These IGPs have been common in HTPC setups with the NVIDIA driver working out well with MythTV. NVIDIA's GeForce 6100/6150 parts have also appeared in a number of desktop systems, and while these IGPs cannot really handle modern games, they have no troubles with Beryl or Compiz. However, it's now time that the GeForce 6 series moves on with NVIDIA having recently introduced the NVIDIA GeForce 7025 and 7050 with the nForce 630a as the replacement for the GeForce 6100 and 6150 with the nForce 410/430. We have decided to look at the NVIDIA GeForce 7050 today as we compare it to the GeForce 6150 and test it in a variety of Linux graphics benchmarks.

Zenwalk Live has been updated against Zenwalk Linux 4.6 and this LiveCD distribution now features Xfce 4.4.1 with notification support, the Xfce Thunar file manager can now handle video thumbnails, and many new Xfce 4.4 panel plug-ins have been added or updated. At the system level is GCC 4.1, Glibc 2.5, and binutils 2.17.50. Last but not least, Zenwalk Live 4.6 includes the Linux-Live scripts with LZMA enabled Squashfs support. Zenwalk Live 4.6 will cost you about 400MB of bandwidth, but it's definitely an interesting LiveCD that is worth trying out whether you're a Linux junkie or Windows user.

It was on July 20, 2006 that I had issued The State of ATI Linux while ending off the ATI Redblog, which was a fifty-day experiment for using the ATI fglrx driver under Linux exclusively to see how well the driver really could compare to that of NVIDIA's binary competition. It's going on a year later and it's now time for this year's address as far as what I have seen from the driver in the past year and where I hope and believe the driver is going in the near future.

Out of all of the Ubuntu derivative distributions, the one that's received the least amount of attention really has been Edubuntu. With a slogan of "Linux for Young Human Beings", Edubuntu is a Linux distribution designed for students and use in school environments. It includes several applications for students and the younger ones that cater towards education and is not included in Ubuntu, Kubuntu, or Xubuntu. Coinciding with last week's release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 2 was also the second alpha build for Edubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, which is featured today at Phoronix.

The last time we had written an article on Nouveau, the community project working on developing an open-source 3D display driver for NVIDIA hardware, was this past January after being enlightened by glxgears finally being able to run on NVIDIA's NV4x GPUs. Since then many developments have occurred with this open-source NVIDIA driver as we have covered in several news postings. In this article today we will share with you where the Nouveau project stands today from a user perspective as well as testing out the driver on a few more NVIDIA systems.

Today AMD has officially released their low-end and mainstream graphics cards in the Radeon HD 2000 family, the Radeon HD 2400 and Radeon HD 2600 series respectively. While these new graphics cards should already be at your favorite retailer or presently in route, where are the Linux drivers? AMD's high-end Radeon HD 2900XT was pushed out the door in early May, but we have yet to see any official support for that or any of the graphics processors in the Radeon HD 2000 series under Linux.

"...If you care about my situation (which I think is representative of many others' too) please let me know if you decide to go with free software support. You could make a lot of friends that way - not just with me (and those I influence) but in the wider Linux community. Don't you want that market?"

At Phoronix we are constantly exploring the different display drivers under Linux, and while we have reviewed Sun's Check Tool and test motherboards with Solaris in addition to covering a few other areas, we have yet to perform a graphics driver comparison between Linux and Solaris. That is until today. With interest in Solaris on the rise thanks to Project Indiana, we have decided to finally offer our first quantitative graphics comparison between Linux and Solaris with the NVIDIA proprietary drivers.

It was just two weeks ago that NVIDIA had introduced the 100.14.09 display driver, but today we have another new Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD driver out from the green binary camp. The NVIDIA 100.14.11 display driver adds support for their new GeForce 7 integrated graphics, fixes console restoration problems, and improves some other areas of their Linux (as well as FreeBSD and Solaris) driver.

The second beta release for KateOS 3.6 features a new update notifier, the new Linux 2.6.21.4 kernel, X.Org 7.2, Xfce 4.4.1, and updates to the installer itself along with stomping a fair number of bugs. KateOS 3.6 features an installable LiveCD as well as an install DVD for installing this desktop Linux distribution with ease along with the possibility to select from GNOME, KDE, and Xfce.

Last week the first open-source ATI R500 (Radeon X1000 series) driver had entered the world. This new driver (named the xf86-video-avivo) is very early into development, but a small set of developers have been working on reverse engineering this GPU class for the past couple of months. This driver does not yet contain any 3D functionality or support for features that most end-users expect. At this point, the driver just contains very basic initialization and set video mode support for a portion of the Radeon X1000 family. Even with this very basic R500 driver, we couldn't help but to explore the Avivo driver for the past few days.

The Light edition of the Mint 3.0 Linux distribution is now available. Compared to the regular version of Mint, the Light edition ships without proprietary software, patented technologies, and support for restricted formats. We took a peek this afternoon at this GNOME-based LiveCD distribution.

In addition to Chris DiBona's words about NVIDIA and ATI binary display drivers, Google had also made an interesting splash at the first-ever Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (which they had kindly hosted at their Mountain View campus) during a presentation by the Google Linux Client Team. What was it? Well, there are some "significant accomplishments" and other new Google desktop applications coming out this year for the Linux platform.

The third test release of Parsix GNU/Linux 0.90 is now available. New in this LiveCD is GNOME 2.18.2, Sun Java replaced by GCJ, added the Parsix Book to the LiveCD, several bug fixes, glibc 2.5, and many other improvements. If you've never tried out Parsix, it's based on a combination of KANOTIX and Debian that is a well polished distribution worth trying out for desktop users.

We have previously looked at the NVIDIA 100.14.03 and 100.14.06 display drivers, but this afternoon we finally have our hands on the stable NVIDIA 100.14.09 driver. New in version 100.14.09 is added GeForce 8 and Quadro product support, improved notebook GPU support, improved RenderAccel support for sub-pixel anti-aliased fonts, added Xv brightness and contrast controls, improved interaction with newer kernels, and fixing an issue with nvidia-settings. The new yet-to-be-released GeForce 8 names have also tipped up in the release notes. We've seen many of these features introduced in the previous 100.14.xx builds, but they are now officially supported.