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Dig deep into the performance of the new 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 series processor and how to maximize its features for your applications.

Apple ups the ante against Android with iPhone OS version 4 -- but first they have to answer to the 3.3.1 worm.

Bombono is a simple to use DVD authoring program that doesn't have the steep learning curve of many others in its field. Or in the words of the Web site: “Bombono DVD is a DVD authoring program for Linux. It is easy to use and has nice and clean GUI (Gtk).” Also from the Web site, the main features of Bombono DVD are: more>>

Father of Java, son of Canada Oracle's chief technology officer James Gosling, inherited from the take over of Sun, is leaving the company.…

Vimscript is a mechanism for reshaping and extending the Vim editor. Scripting allows you to create new tools, simplify common tasks, and even redesign and replace existing editor features. This article (the first in a series) introduces the fundamental components of the Vimscript programming language: values, variables, expressions, statements, functions, and commands. These features are demonstrated and explained through a series of simple examples.

According to the release plans, the release of X Server 1.8 should take place, and while in reality it will likely not be released today, its release is coming soon. When this release does arrive, it will add a new set of features to the X.Org stack and a number of other minor improvements and bug-fixes.

Taking legal action against *all* companies producing software stacks for smartphones would allow Microsoft to claim with some semblance of plausibility that it was not specifically targeting Linux this time (unlike its previous sabre-rattling statements about patent infringement that were specifically aimed at Linux). But the net effect would be that Linux would be the chief victim of such an approach, since any companies using it in their smartphones are likely to end up doing deals with Microsoft - and hence implicitly accepting its claims - whatever the open source community might think or want. It would be like Novell's pact with Microsoft, writ large and much worse.

With Google said to be working with Intel and Sony to develop a way to bring the best of the Internet to television, industry analysts wonder if the time for a smart TV has finally arrived.

For those interested in the next major update to the GIMP graphics editing application (GIMP 2.8), it now has a tentative release date. GIMP's Martin Nordholts has announced on his blog that GIMP 2.8 is scheduled for release on the 27th of December of this year...

Microsoft has issued Security Advisory (979352) after its own investigations into the highly-organized hacking attack in late December, the one that Google earlier this week insinuated came from China, led the software giant to conclude that a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability in Internet Explorer was used by the perpetrators.

For those that may have forgot, at the start of December we launched the Phoronix Kernel Test Farm to begin benchmarking the Linux kernel on a daily basis using the automated tools that we provide via the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic. Towards the middle of December we then unveiled the Phoromatic Tracker, which exposes these test results in real-time to the public. Well, it's now been a month of monitoring the kernel's performance and the entire Linux 2.6.33 kernel development cycle thus far, with many interesting findings.

Today is the birthday of Linus. Although that's essentially a private event for him, there's an interesting historical link to the creation of the Linux kernel, too. read more

Compared to past years when recapping the AMD/ATI Linux advancements over the past calendar year, 2009 was not quite as exciting, which can be viewed as both good and bad for their Catalyst Linux driver. There were many advancements this year on AMD's open-source side, but in 2009 there wasn't as many milestones for their Catalyst driver like in the past with the introduction of CrossFire, OverDrive, same-day Linux support, the AMD Catalyst Control Center, and other new features. Here is our 2009 year in review look at AMD's advancements to their proprietary Catalyst Linux driver along with our annual benchmarks.

As a Christmas (or holiday) gift to all Linux users, Linus Torvalds last night put out the Linux 2.6.33-rc2 kernel release. This is the second release candidate since the closing of the Linux 2.6.33 kernel merge window, that brought the long-awaited Nouveau driver, many other graphics improvements, and other exciting changes.

The holiday 2.6.33-rc2 release announcement from Linus Torvalds can be read at LKML.org. While I may be away on a sabbatical for Windows, you can continue to see how the performance of the Linux 2.6.33 kernel continues to evolve on a daily basis using the Phoromatic Tracker's kernel tracker...

In the vast world of communication, instant messaging is a long-standing medium. Facebook has entered the scene relatively recently, as has Twitter. If you use these newer mediums of communication and you're a Pidgin user then you may want to look at the Pidgin plugins for accessing them.

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With the FreeBSD 8.0 release now available, we reached out to NVIDIA to find out the status of their 64-bit BSD display driver, now that this operating system carries the necessary mmap extension support in their 64-bit kernel for their proprietary graphics driver to function. Andy Ritger, who heads the user-space side of NVIDIA's UNIX Graphics Driver team and was previously interviewed by Phoronix, provided a brief update.

Ritger doesn't have a firm ETA when a 64-bit BSD display driver will be released, but he hopes soon...

The KOffice team is very happy to announce version 2.1.0 of KOffice, 6 months after the platform release 2.0.0. This release brings a number of new features as well as general improvements in the maturity of the individual applications. Importing of documents have also been given an overhaul. read more

Oooh, spooky! Microsoft has once again denied rumours that it built a backdoor into Windows 7.

Today’s release of the list of the top 500 supercomputers shows that well over 90% are running Linux. Also,...

Increasing raw throughput over its predecessor by a factor of ten, the new Sun Constellation supercomputer was officially launched today.