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Last week I delivered OpenGL/3D benchmarks of Ubuntu 12.10 when comparing the performance of the default Unity desktop to the now-defunct Unity 2D environment. Canonical's decision to kill Unity 2D means that for those now forced to use the Compiz-based Unity may experience lower frame-rates, high power consumption with Unity-over-LLVMpipe, and other differences. Additional testing has shown how Unity is affecting the 2D graphics performance.

Well it was a dark, dark week in the Linux blogosphere last week, as further evidence of the economy's sickly state spread across the land. Tale after tale of personal tragedy has popped up on Google+ and beyond, in fact, making it more clear than ever that the magnitude of this economic crisis has reached nothing short of epic proportions.

LXer Feature: 19-Aug-2012

In the Roundup this week we have a 3.5.5 review of GNOME, as well as going all out and starting a OS of there own, Debian celebrates its 19th birthday, Red Hat finally commits to OpenStack and Carla Schroder talks about discovering and monitoring your hardware. Enjoy!

Adobe surprised many in open source circles with its August 2 release of Source Sans Pro, an open font made available under the standard SIL Open Font License (OFL). Adobe has not historically been an open source player (beyond its involvement with standard file formats like PDF or SVG), so Source Sans Pro is not only its first foray into open fonts, but may also herald an interest in adopting open source development methods. Designer Paul Hunt announced the font in a post on the Adobe typography blog. The font is available in six weights, with regular and italic versions for each. The first release covers an extended Latin character set, but according to the comments other writing systems are reportedly still to come. Downloads are hosted at SourceForge.net.

If you have been in the industry for a decade or more, you probably have a pretty good idea of what being a Unix sysadmin is all about. Load the OS? Check. Configure local user accounts? Check. Install packages, compile some from scratch? Double check. Unix has not changed all that much, so it would be easy to assume that the job you were doing ten years ago would be the same job that you can do for the foreseeable future. But, that is the trap of dinosaurs my friend, the weather has already changed, and the days of dealing with bare metal are already moving fast behind us.

In our last installment, we created a set-up allowing you to keep all the various revisions to your documents, without the need to resort to tricks like appending file names with version numbers. So now you have this repository of documents, how do you take advantage of it? In this article we’ll show you how to recall a previous version of a document (we’re all familiar with thinking putting something brilliant in a document, only to have it overwritten), as well as how to download all your in-process work to another machine.

KMSCON is turning out to be a successful and interesting project with high ambitions of being the leading terminal emulator for Linux while running from user-space...

Next month in Nürnberg prior to the start of XDC2012, X.Org developers hope to get together and write a book about graphics driver development. An X.Org book sprint is planned in the two days leading up to XDC2012 at the SUSE offices in Nürnberg, Germany. This book sprint isn't starting from ground zero but rather the developers that show up to participate will be working off of the documentation that was begun by Stéphane Marchesin a while back (here's a PDF of where it's at today).

In the Big Data market, Hadoop is clearly the team to beat. What is less clear is which of the Hadoop vendors will claim the spoils of that victory. Because open source tends to be winner-take-all, we are almost certainly going to see a "Red Hat" of Hadoop, with the second place vendor left to clean up the crumbs. As ever with open source, this means the Hadoop market ultimately comes down to a race for community support because, as Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady argues, the biggest community wins.

Valve's Steam Linux beta will be available fairly soon. In a new video interview, Gabe Newell confirmed "we will have betas for Steam for Linux and Steam Big Play fairly soon." Newell mentioned, "If customers want to build game consoles with Steam based on Linux. That's great." Plus other interesting comments during his interview about Valve.

Nothing ever need be a mystery on Linux as it has a large number of excellent utilities for discovering hardware and monitoring hardware health. Here are a handful of good tools for spotting possible hard drive failure, displaying hardware information and monitoring temperatures, fans, voltages, email, music players and more.

With ubiquitous Google Maps installed as standard on smartphone OS market leader Android's devices, why anyone would need anything else? Well, the principal benefit of an app like BackCountry Navigator Pro GPS is that it provides offline access to topographic maps, which represent terrain using graphical contour lines, aiding in outdoor-activity navigation.

The Free Software Foundation's "Defective By Design" campaign has introduced a new "DRM Free" label. The idea behind the label is to identify products that do not have DRM protection so that they are easier for consumers to find in stores, and give those products a competitive advantage.

When we talk about mobile operating system, the attention immediately turns to iOS or Android. If you recall, not so long ago, there is also another mobile OS in the market – WebOS, which Hewlett-Packard (HP) used on their own tables and phones and resulted in total market failure. WebOS, by itself, is a great mobile OS to start with, but in the world where iOS and Android dominates with tens of thousands of apps, it pales in comparison. After HP decided to dump their tablets at a cheap price, they have also released the WebOS as an open source project. Today, we will show you how you can run WebOS in your Linux computer, using Virtualbox.

Imagine arriving at a conference where you immediately recognize Linux kernel developers from their annual Linux Kernel Summit photo. You connect with colleagues from other companies but with whom you're working on collaborative, open source projects. A lot of faces in the sessions are familiar and a lot are new. Your session and hallway discussions move beyond talk and you start working on advancing your projects right there at the conference. You might even start a new one. And, at night you leave the laptop in the bag and you enjoy amazing venues and great laughs. This is LinuxCon/CloudOpen.

With all the ongoing debate over desktop environments here in the Linux blogosphere, there's never any shortage of discussion of the GNOME project, even on an ordinary day. Last Tuesday, however, was no ordinary day -- at least, if a certain blog post was anything to go by. "The idea of GNOME OS has been around for a couple of years," wrote GNOME UX designer Allan Day in said post.

If you are planning to buy one of the new Apple MacBook Pro notebooks with a Retina Display for use under Linux, hold off on your purchase. Running the Retina MacBook Pro with Linux isn't a trouble-free experience and after using even the latest development code and jumping through various hoops, Linux on the latest Apple hardware is still less than an ideal experience. Linux support will improve for the Retina MacBook Pro in the coming months, but it's not likely to see any proper "out of the box" experience until next year.

Following in the footsteps of Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple, Oracle is now turning to hardware acceleration to speed up Java by harnessing the emerging potential of the GPU. The OpenJDK project’s Hotspot group has said it will explore ways of speeding Java with a native Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that taps hardware acceleration.

Today, Debian celebrates its 19th birthday. To commemorate the occasion, parties have been organised all around the globe and users traditionally bake cakes to bring to these events

The team behind Calligra, the graphic art and office suite for KDE, created from KOffice, has just announced the release of version 2.5 of its suite. This release has many new and improved features, and may be especially useful for people who want strong graphics and diagramming features in a suite of applications that includes productivity apps such as a word processor and a spreadsheet.