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Most often when benchmarking Intel hardware on Phoronix it's from the latest-generation "Ivy Bridge" or previous-generation "Sandy Bridge" families because, well, that's what is most interesting and exciting right now. Intel has made lots of open-source Linux driver advancements for this latest Intel hardware -- while simultaneously working on next-generation Haswell and Valley View support -- but how is their support standing for much older hardware? In this article are benchmarks from an Intel Atom with GMA3150 integrated graphics.

Motorola Mobility has introduced a desktop all-in-one computer running the Android operating system. The Cloud Broadband is being launched in China in partnership with WASU Digital Group. The device is being touted to Chinese consumers as a combination of an HD digital TV with live and on-demand capability, and a touchscreen tablet/PC running Android.

A regional court in Munich has ruled that Google-owned Motorola Mobility infringed an Apple patent related to touchscreen technology. The court placed a preliminary injunction on devices that use the patent-infringing tech, including the Motorola Milestone XT720, the Motorola Defy, the Motorola Atrix and the Motorola Xoom.

The Maqetta HTML5 user interface (UI) designer has been given a visual styling makeover for the new Release 7. The Dojo Foundation-hosted project offers an IDE-styled environment for the creation of HTML5 UIs, whether for the desktop or for mobile devices. Release 7's makeover also includes new collapsible palettes of elements on the left and right side of the in-work user interface design, a streamlined HTML file creation interface and redesigned toolbar. The update comes with a number of performance improvements in both the page editor and the preview-in-browser mode, which now incorporates Dojo's Zazl for server-side rendering.

Well it's been a stressful few days here in the Linux blogosphere, what with the ruckus going on over in the bordering Apple territories. For such a small strip of land, you'd never think such a din could emanate from there, and all over a rectangle with rounded corners -- however "creative" and "innovative" it might be.

A tentative schedule for the second LinuxCon Europe event, which will take place from 5 to 7 November in Barcelona, has been posted on the conference's web site. Keynote speakers include Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth and Eucalyptus CEO Mårten Mickos. The conference will also feature a discussion of the latest technical advancements in the Linux kernel between Linus Torvalds and Intel's Chief of Linux and Open Source Technologies Dirk Hondel. Like its North American sister event, LinuxCon Europe is being organised by the Linux Foundation and is mostly targeted at software developers and business users of Linux but "anyone else with an interest in the Linux ecosystem" can attend as well, according to the event's web site.

We've covered Audacity on a number of occasions. Audacity is an audio production platform that compares very well with software used in professional environments, including tools for silencing ambient noise, combining, cutting, moving, and mixing tracks. Its mixboard and equalization features are awesome, and it's also a great podcasting platform. A few very useful, free guides and workbooks are now available that can help you master this awesome audio program quickly. Here is how to get going.

The VectorLinux distro does an impressive job of blending a traditional Linux environment with the performance of other more mainstream offerings. VectorLinux is not a newcomer to the Linux desktop world. Despite its more than 10 years in development, this distro is not as well known as other Linux choices.

The jQuery developers have dropped the GPL (General Public Licence) from the dual licensing of the popular JavaScript library in recent releases of jQuery Core, UI, Mobile and other projects. The changes were announced in a blog post; the foundation says they are designed to eliminate confusion and make things easier for the foundation to manage, and they leave jQuery projects licensed under only the MIT licence, the other licence of the previous dual licensing.

How do the Linux and open source communities define the open cloud? Our Leaders of the Open Cloud series posed this key question, along with many others, to industry heavyweights in the 10 weeks leading up to the CloudOpen conference in San Diego last month. Here, we’ve distilled their answers into a slideshow to illustrate the range of participants and viewpoints as well as some areas of contention.

With Unity 2D being abandoned and only providing Unity + Compiz in Ubuntu 12.10 as the default desktop, the out-of-the-box experience for low-powered ARM hardware on the stock Ubuntu desktop is a mess. Last month the decision was made by Canonical to do away with Unity 2D now that LLVMpipe is coming into shape as a decent Gallium3D software rasterizer inside Mesa. LLVMpipe has been talked about since its very early days on Phoronix for running OpenGL on the CPU. With this being the default software fallback now in order to support Compiz, rather than going with the Qt-based Unity 2D, it's okay for x86 users.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the sponsor of Ubuntu, has invested $1 million in Inktank, the company that provides commercial support for the open source Ceph distributed storage system. The investment comes in the form of a "convertible note" and will be used to fund the expansion of the company.

The tool collection util-linux has been extended to include resizepart, a utility that is useful when repartitioning. Some X.org graphics drivers now support hybrid graphics. The infrastructure to support UEFI Secure Boot is maturing.

NVIDIA has announced today the graphics cards that are no longer supported by their mainline Linux graphics driver going forward but will be moved to a new 304.xx Linux legacy driver branch. The information that NVIDIA officially posted today is basically the same as what I wrote two weeks back in NVIDIA To Discontinue Linux Support For Some GPUs. With the NVIDIA 304.xx proprietary driver series that they're currently on, they will be ending support for GeForce 6 "NV4x" and GeForce 7 "G7x" graphics processors.

"A while back I wrote a review on Windows 8, but when writing a review they tend to be more based on first impressions rather than how a system actually grows on you," wrote Ken Quirk, a committed Linux fan and Ubuntu user. "So, in the interest of fairness I have decided to give Windows 8 a fair crack of the whip."

The new release of PostgreSQL, version 9.2, has arrived, four months after the appearance of the first beta version. The new release includes read and write performance boosts, index-only scanning, new web-oriented functionality, and support for range data types. As shown in the beta, the new version promises to be much faster than its predecessor primarily thanks to index-only scanning, which allows searches to avoid reading the underlying tables and instead search only indexes. This new feature is used automatically, though there are caveats as to how effective it can be all situations, but where the required data is already indexed, for example in "big data" scenarios, the boost in performance can be huge.

While most of the Linux desktop talk these days is about Unity, KDE, and GNOME, advancing in a quiet but steadfast manner is Xfce. The next major release of Xfce, version 4.12, is due out in March. It's undecided at this time though whether Xfce 4.12 will use GTK2 or GTK3.

Continuing to advance as an open-source project is a game engine that's written from scratch with an aim of being compatible with the original Half-Life "Gold Source" engine. This GPL-licensed engine is already working with many original Valve games and mods. A Phoronix reader wrote in this morning to bring up Xash3D, which is self-described as a "Custom Gold Source Engine build from a scratch." The Xash3D engine isn't brand new but has been around for a while now and is continuing to mature -- it should already work for almost any existing single-player Half-Life mod without having any compatibility issues. The multi-player code to the Xash3D engine is also incomplete at the moment.

The WordPress developers have released an update to their open source publishing platform that closes important security holes. Version 3.4.2 of WordPress addresses two privilege escalation vulnerabilities that could potentially be exploited by a malicious user to bypass certain security restrictions. WordPress is often a target for attackers and ensuring it is secure protects not only the published content but the readers of the content.

The thicket of lawsuits surrounding the mobile industry has grown to the point that it is hard for any individual action to stand out. If any case has managed to make itself visible in that crowd anyway, it is the battle between Apple and Samsung currently being fought in the US. The first stage of that battle has just been resolved, heavily in Apple's favor. It will be some time before this story truly reaches its end, but some of the more interesting implications for the industry, and for free software, can already be seen.