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Today, KDE has released a second release candidate of the upcoming 4.7 release of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Frameworks, which is planned for July 27, 2011. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing last-minute showstopper bugs and finishing translation and documentation that comes along with the releases.

Up for review today is a low-end NVIDIA Fermi graphics card, the GeForce GT 520. The low-end graphics processor it uses, the GF119, was released back in April. The graphics card only has 48 Stream processors and uses DDR3 memory with a 64-bit bus, except the cost on this creation is just around $60 USD.

Yet again Marek Olšák has made another great improvement to Mesa. Recently this independent developer has been working quite a lot in implementing OpenGL 3.0 support for the open-source Mesa stack. Ending out this weekend, he now has working OGL3 floating-point depth buffers per the GL_ARB_depth_buffer_float extension...

Since the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0, 242 days have passed. Additionally, 129 days have passed since the release of Scientific Linux 6.0, which is one of the popular community rebuilds of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 source packages. Only today, however, is CentOS 6.0 ISOs beginning to surface...

One of the items I've been working on recently for Phoronix Test Suite 3.4-Lillesand is new ways to visualize performance result data generated by the many test profiles and suites available via OpenBenchmarking.org. Here's one of the new ways that was committed over the weekend to the Lillesand Git code-base...

Apple Time Machine is a feature that was introduced in Mac OS X 10.5 nearly four years ago, which allows the automatic creation of incremental file back-ups that can be restored at a later date, either for the entire system or just an individual file. Mac OS X programs can also become Time Machine-aware themselves to take advantage of these incremental backups. Basic read-only support for better managing Apple Time Machine back-ups is now available to Linux users via a new virtual file-system aptly called the Time Machine File-System...

A non-revolution five years in the making Oracle has published the first release candidate for JDK 7, the long-awaited next version of Java set to officially debut on July 28.…

McCain says it will supply San Francisco with a new Linux-based traffic controller computer that meets the latest Advanced Transportation Controller (ATC) standards. Built around a Freescale PowerQUICC II Pro processor, the & 2070LXN2 NEMA& offers several keypads, an 8x40 display, plus Ethernet, USB, serial, and SDLC connections, says the company.

A few weeks ago I was working on a PC when I needed to grab the motherboard driver CD. In a perfect world, the CD would be located in a nice protective sleeve, safely kept away from the nasty elements that encompass the IT tech area (read: coffee, scratches, and the occasional jelly doughnut). But in this case, it appeared someone had taken this CD and wiped it.

The July 2011 update for KDE is now available. KDE SC 4.6.5 is this new release, and as usual for KDE monthly point releases, it just brings a variety of bug-fixes and translation updates...

Following last week's completion of the Radeon driver power management tests against the AMD Catalyst driver, now it is time to turn the tables on NVIDIA. In this article are some power consumption and thermal tests when comparing the latest open-source "Nouveau" driver code against NVIDIA's closed-source proprietary driver.

Netflix has launched a certification program for its Netflix HD application, awarding its first seal of approval to Texas Instruments' OMAP 4 processor and WiLink 7.0 chipset running on Android 2.3. TI's dual-core OMAP 4 won the certification thanks to its ability to play 1080p video at 30fps and its on-chip support for DRM (digital rights management)....

With the great popularity of C, you would think that a wide variety of solutions would have flourished

Microsoft has entered into a patent-licensing agreement with Wistron that for the first time covers Google's Chrome OS as well as Android. The agreement -- announced a day after a Microsoft-led consortium beat out Google for Nortel's wireless patents -- covers smartphones, tablets, and e-readers, suggesting Wistron may be working on a Chrome OS tablet....

Webian Shell is a web-based shell that is designed to run full-screen and function as the primary user interface for your computer. At the moment, it's still at the proof of concept stage, but 0.1 is runnable without making any modifications to your system. As it features some interesting ideas, it's worth having a play around with.

Last week we delivered results looking at the power consumption of Ubuntu 11.04 versus Windows 7, which was interesting in its own right, but in this article is a brief look at where Apple's Mac OS X operating system fits in between the power consumption of Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft Windows.

Celebrating the US Independence Day, while many Americans are spending time with their families, drinking (usually nasty) beer and BBQ'ing, others talking to Microsoft, the Red Hat virtualization team has released a new version of libvirt. The libvirt 0.9.3 release brings many changes...

Android left nude as enemies shrug on extra IP armour Apple, Microsoft, RIM, EMC, Ericsson and Sony all chipped in to buy the patents, which cover critical 4G and wireless broadband technologies, leaving Google empty handed.…

Last month when publishing Fedora 15 vs. Ubuntu 11.04 benchmarks in some of the disk workloads the Fedora Linux release was behind that of Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. Some users speculated in our forums that SELinux was to blame, but later tests show SELinux does not cause a huge performance impact. With Security Enhanced Linux not to blame, some wondered if Fedora's use of LVM, the Logical Volume Manager, by default was the cause.

Red Hat came a step closer to its goal of being the first Linux vendor to make $1 billion in revenue in one year while taking another step with its MRG offering. The GNOME foundation and Sabayon Linux also saw forward momentum, and Linux 3.0 got a speed bump.