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The 2.6.35 distribution of the Linux kernel has been released, incorporating support for future Intel graphics chips, power management for AMD Radeon chips and Google-donated network performance improvements for multiple processor systems, among 22 areas of significant change.

An article on open source security has sparked off a furious backlash in the normally polite and businesslike world of a British Computer Society journal. Commentards have reacted furiously to a piece by Steve Smith, managing director of IT security consultancy Pentura, in the July Edition of ITNow. A lengthy first response by Luke Leighton takes the article apart paragraph by paragraph and contains a dozen expunged swearwords. The opening line of the 4,000 word rebuttal, for example, reads "the BCS is supposed to be a reputable organisation, yet this article - every paragraph - is complete [DELETED]."

Ubuntu is a distribution that people have strong feelings about, both pro and con. Last week, those feelings erupted again after former Red Hat employee and Fedora community architect Greg DeKoenigsberg ranted about Ubuntu's contributions to the GNOME desktop in his blog.

The tenth annual Debian Developer Conference has opened in New York City, marking the first time the event has been held in the U.S. The event will explore the latest developments with the Debian Linux distribution, which underlies Linux distros including Ubuntu, Xandros, and Chrome OS.

As I alluded to recently, the second round of Windows 7 vs. Linux benchmarks -- with the first round consisting of Is Windows 7 Actually Faster Than Ubuntu 10.04 and Mac OS X vs. Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu benchmarks -- are currently being done atop a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook that is quite popular with business professionals. With the high-end ThinkPad W510 boasting a dual quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU with Hyper-Threading plus a NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics processor, we began this second round of cross-platform benchmarks by running a set of workstation tests. In this article we are mainly looking at the workstation graphics (via SPECViewPerf) performance along with some CPU/disk tests.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has released the new Linux 2.6.35 kernel, providing users of the open source operating system with new networking capabilities and performance enhancements, along with filesystem improvements.

The co-creator of DTrace has seemingly erased all memory of Larry Ellison’s Oracle from his mind, after quitting Sun Microsystems for an engineering veep role at Joyent last week. Bryan Cantrill is the latest in a long list of Sun men to quit the firm, following its takeover by Oracle earlier this year. His exit came just a week after Greg Lavender, the lead developer in charge of the Solaris operating system at Oracle, left the company. Worse still, the OpenSolaris Governing Board, which is supposed to steer the open source version of Solaris, is mulling disbanding because Oracle has had zero contact with the board for the past six months.

Traditionally at Phoronix we have stayed away from publishing benchmarks of Gentoo and similar source-based distributions for the lack of them having a standard or "stock" configuration for which one can easily replicate our tested software stack due to all of the different variables that come into play so the value of these benchmarks are much less compared to those distributions providing pre-compiled binaries for a standardized set of packages. However, satisfying a number of requests, we are publishing such benchmarks today. Rather than using Gentoo itself for benchmarking, we are using Calculate Linux Desktop, which is Gentoo-based while providing a very nice "out of the box" experience, i686 and x86_64 binaries, and overall is a polished and user-friendly Gentoo experience.

LXer Feature: 02-Aug-2010

A roundup of the big stories hitting our newswire from the previous week.

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 2.6.35 kernel, adding improvements to multicore support, network scalability, memory management, power management, and Btrfs file-system I/O. Meanwhile, we take a peek at Linux 2.6.36, and note Linux Journal's history of the Linux kernel, Slackware, Debian, and some 450 other distros.

As you may know, the Linux and open source community provides a wealth of free operating systems (OSs), called distributions, and software applications. Some are desktop distributions for general-use in the office. However, there are many distributions designed for particular uses. Today, we'll review 4 different desktop distributions specifically designed for educational and academic use.

A census of open source developers has provided a sharp reminder of the necessity of commercially viable open source companies, and also how important it is that commercially viable open source companies employ good people to write open source. This probably isn't news to Reg readers, for whom it might be bleeding obvious - perhaps even tautological. But out in the worlds of academia and policy wonkery, the myth that F/OSS development is some kind of happy, Kumbaya potlatch still persists.

Checkinstall is a utility that builds a .deb, .rpm or Slackware package from a third party source code tarball. This allows you to introduce such third party software using the standard package management features of your distribution. In contrast, the conventional instructions for installing such software packages puts your package manager out of sync with the actual collection of software installed on your Linux box.

One of the free software projects we have been talking to as of late about better enhancing their benchmarking capabilities for likely integration into the Phoronix Test Suite is Rigs of Rods. While the graphics within this driving simulator may not be the best (at least when compared to Unigine, or within the open-source world, Nexuiz) it's not the graphics that the developers pride themselves on but rather the physics capabilities. Rigs of Rods began as a truck driving simulator game, but since then has turned into a rather interesting physics sandbox of goodies. A new release of their code-base was just made.

James Morris has outlined a preview of the security subsystem changes he is currently carrying in his security-testing-next branch of the Linux kernel that he plans to have Linus Torvalds pull into the next kernel development cycle for Linux 2.6.36. The big change in the kernel security world is that AppArmor is being planned for integration into the Linux 2.6.36 kernel.

There are still a few weeks left before the deadline that demands Oracle appoint a community liaison for their OpenSolaris operating system that is capable of communicating their future intentions to the OpenSolaris community (like where the hell is OpenSolaris 2010.1H) or else the OpenSolaris Governing Board will return control of the community back to Oracle. However, some OpenSolaris community developers have already had enough: they've begun work on a new project.

The Linux scheduler, in both the mainline and realtime versions, provides a couple of scheduling classes for realtime tasks. These classes implement the classic POSIX priority-based semantics, wherein the highest-priority runnable task is guaranteed to have access to the CPU. While this scheduler works as advertised, priority-based scheduling has a number of problems and has not been the focus of realtime research for some time. Cool schedulers in this century are based on deadlines instead. Linux does not yet have a deadline scheduler, though there is one in the works. A recent discussion on implementing the full deadline model has shown, once again, just how complex it can be to get deadline scheduling right in the real world.

Japanese mobile Linux software firm Access announced a major push toward Android, joining the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), and releasing a free "Graffiti" handwriting recognition app for Android, among other developments. Meanwhile, Access' IP Infusion subsidiary has added MPLS-Transport Profile support to its ZebOS Network Platform software, says the company.

We have recently covered how to use your Android phone to access the internet on your computer. This process is known as tethering. By connecting your phone, via a USB cable, to your computer you are able to use the phone’s data connection to browse the web on your computer. In places where there aren’t any wireless hotspots, tethering is incredibly useful.

Nearly Consulting, which specialises in community relations and free software strategy, has published the results of its GNOME Census. According to Nearly Consulting founder Dave Neary, the census report analyses how developers participate in the GNOME project and looks for patterns within the project itself.