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The key to good SSD performance is the controller. One SSD controller that has received good reviews is the SandForce SF-1200. However, a recent test of a SF-1200 SSD reveals some interesting things about what this controller does and just how it does it. Depending upon your point of view and, radically, your data, performance can be amazing. Continue reading →

New Linux users still, after all these years, think it should be a free Windows clone. Well it's not. Matt Hartley presents 20 new user misconceptions that need to die once and for all.

Fluxbox, the X window manager derived from Blackbox, has reached version 1.3...

Open sourcers unite! Open...and Shut Microsoft used to be the bête noire of open-source advocates, riling freedom-loving software developers with its sometimes anti-competitive behavior.…

Who is smarter, Linux or people? IBM's SUSE Linux powered supercomputer Watson faces off against human contestants on the TV game show "Jeopardy".

Nokia, we invited you into our house. We let you put your feet on the coffee table.  And yet this is how you treat us? Heck, we even tolerated the resistive screen on the N900, because it was a full blown Linux computer. We even put MeeGo on the cover of our March issue, and now you decide to defect to the dark side? Oh, Nokia... more>>

The Nouveau (and PathScale) developers working on reverse-engineering the NVIDIA Linux binary driver in turn to write a free software driver with 2D/3D acceleration for all of NVIDIA's graphics processors, have another accomplishment under their belt today. They've now merged the NVC0 (a.k.a. "Fermi") acceleration support into the xf86-video-nouveau DDX driver...

The Unigine Engine, which is developed by the Linux-friendly Unigine Corp and is known as providing the most advanced and demanding OpenGL Linux game engine at this time, has been ported to run on tablet computers and smart-phones running Google's Android operating system. Wow...

The most common Linux file-systems we talk about at Phoronix are of course Btrfs and EXT4 while the ZFS file-system, which is available on Linux as a FUSE (user-space) module or via a recent kernel module port, gets mentioned a fair amount too. When it comes to the FreeBSD and PC-BSD operating systems, ZFS is looked upon as the superior, next-generation option that is available to BSD users. However, with the DragonFlyBSD operating system there is another option: HAMMER. In this article we are seeing how the performance of this original creation within the DragonFlyBSD project competes with ZFS, UFS, EXT3, EXT4, and Btrfs.

Learn how to use the command line from Linux to create an instance in the IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud environment. The author also shows you how to create multiple instances with a simple script.

Last week we learned that Yum supports a robust ecosystem of plugins, and how to find and manage them. Today we look at some good Yum plugins for security, and managing package priorities.

This week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (I'll be there again looking out for Linux), Intel will officially launch their next-generation Sandy Bridge micro-architecture and CPUs. The NDA though expired at midnight on these first CPUs so there is now a stream of reviews coming out. Is there any Linux graphics test results for the Core i5 2500K and Core i7 2600K? Unfortunately, there is not...

In December we published our first set of Amazon EC2 benchmarks for their Elastic Compute Cloud using Ubuntu EC2 and the different instances that were compatible. Now though we are in the process of carrying out a new set of benchmarks from Amazon's cloud that not only contains more tests, but using the official Amazon Linux AMI we tested nearly every instance type. Except what is missing are the results for the "micro" (the t1.micro API name) instance. Why? It is simply too slow and irregular.

We're tapping the Linux Mag hive-mind this week for Android-based apps that deserve an install. Share your favorites.

Though MeeGo shows a lot of promise, the project is not making the most of the open source developer community. Here's what's wrong, and what MeeGo needs to do better in 2011.

I've shelled out a lot of money over the years on software -- Windows and Mac OS upgrades, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office -- the list goes on and on. Some of it was necessary, but more often than not there are free alternatives out there that do the job just as well or better than the paid software -- someone just has to point you in the right direction. That's what I'll attempt to do here today. Behold, some of my favorite free programs and utilities that I guarantee will make your life easier:

The techies in Kerala have one more feather to add in their cap. India's first open source movie concept is getting ready under Chamba Swathanthra Movie Project, started in Kerala. Open source films (also known as open content films and free content films) are films which are produced and distributed using free and open source software methodologies.

At the 27th Chaos Communication Congress (27C3) in Berlin, security researcher Julia Wolf of US company FireEye pointed out numerous, previously hardly known, security problems in connection with Adobe's PDF standard. For instance, a PDF can reportedly contain a database scanner that becomes active and scans a network when the document is printed on a network printer.

Sure, the webOS App Catalog lags behind the markets of other mobile OSes -- but the homebrew community continues porting apps to HP/Palm's platform. One of the more recent additions is mPlayer, the cross-platform open source media app.

While those using the NVIDIA binary display driver with any modern GeForce graphics processor have great accelerated video playback on the GPU right now via VDPAU, as a GPU-independent way to offload the video playback acceleration from the CPU there s Broadcom's Crystal HD adapter, which is backed by open-source Linux drivers. The Crystal HD has already been tapped by XBMC and other free software projects, but new patches are available to utilize this technology within MPlayer and FFmpeg...