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The Khronos Group has released the latest version of its OpenGL graphics standard, 20 years after SGI first opened up the code. The latest revision, OpenGL 4.3, adds the ability to harness the GPU for shading and draw commands, ETC2/EAC texture compression is included as standard, and an improved debugging system has been added, along with security enhancements aimed at stopping information leakage between applications.

In the last time I was very dissatisfied with the overall system performance of my Sony Vaio VPCEB3Z1E Laptop and the installed Ubuntu 12.04. For example it took more than 10 seconds to start firefox or the chromium browser. Even the installation of new software packages via apt-get was slow. The main performance impact was caused by the installed Samsung SATA drive which was not able to read more than 80 MB per second.

Over the past few months, some of the most disruptive news in gaming has been from Valve. The company seems to be making a baffling sharp left-turn into completely new territory. On the surface it shows a few basic components of its master plan, leaving us to only speculate on what the rest might be. The most ambitious of these revelations, is the announcement that they are planning to try and get the entire catalogue of 2500 games on Steam ported to Linux.

Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the fifth in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.8 series. 4.8.5 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.8 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.8.4 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.

GNOME is continuing to lose supporters as now part of the Linux Mint programming team start working on a fork of the GNOME file manger, Nautilus.

After almost four years, the Damn Small Linux project is back with the release of Damn Small Linux 4.11 RC1. Being just over 50MB in size, the release candidate is still as little as ever.

Who doesn't love a good Monday morning rant? I caught this article on the news feed of my favorite Linux news site this morning and I must say it upsets me a lot. The too long/didn't read version of this guy's article is that Android is "usable" for most users, while he finds desktop Linux lacking in the usability department. He cites a number of reasons why the distribution he selected (Fedora) isn't "usable" compared to Android. Honestly all of them are your normal anti-desktop Linux FUD and I am tired of it.

Between the arrival of both MATE 1.4 and KDE 4.9 and the emergence of SolusOS' brand-new GNOME Classic on the scene, there's no denying it's been an exciting few weeks here in the world of Linux desktops. That, in turn, has made it all the more difficult to witness the identity crisis that has apparently befallen GNOME itself.

There are many speculations in the Internet about the implementation of Linux-based operating systems and free open source software in general on national level. Which countries and projects are usually named? RedHat in Pentagon? Mandriva school project in Brazil? Government projects in Russia and China? They are at the top of the list, aren’t they?

Use location entry in Nautilus in Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon

Pierre Schmitz has announced the availability of a new installation CD/USB image for Arch Linux, version 2012.08.04: "The August snapshot of our live and install media comes with updated packages and the following changes on top of the previous iso image: GRUB 2.00 instead of the legacy 0.9 version is available; the installation guide can be found at /root/install.txt; ZSH with Grml's configuration is used as interactive shell to provide a user friendly and more convenient environment, this includes completion support for pacstrap, arch-chroot, pacman and most other tools; the network daemon, which will automatically setup your network if DHCP is available, is started by default.

While most mainstream Linux distros come with photo management software, these applications are more suited for shutterbugs than serious amateurs and professional photographers.

Nvidia has closed a hole in its proprietary graphics driver for Unix systems that allowed attackers to gain root-level access

Wikipedia defines a cabal as a type of conspiracy where like-minded officials form an association to further the group’s shared cause. This is exactly what is happening: a group of software and hardware engineers have decided that GNU/Linux may be the road forward as Windows 8’s arrival looms. What is happening is inevitable: NOTHING lasts forever.

UNetbootin is a simple no frills tool, the type of program that used to populate the shelves at Egghead and other software stores back before the Internet changed everything. Using it to make a bootable USB drive from an ISO image is so easy even your grandmother could do it. Not only that, the application comes equipped to download and copy quite a few tools that might come in handy on a rescue drive.

The first choice you make after opening UNetbootin is between “Distribution” and “Diskimage.” If you choose the first option, you then choose a distro and version from two drop down list boxes. If the distro you need is on the list, this saves you the chore of downloading the image yourself, it’s all done for you. In addition, this list includes the tools you need for a good rescue operation, such as Parted Magick, Dr. Web Antivirus and NTPasswd.

Microsoft is apparently unwilling to discuss the reasons behind its move to a so-called secure boot process for Windows 8, the next release of its operating system.

I have spend endless hours playing Nibbles (Gnome Snake Game) in the past, but this game now feels old. So I decided to write my own Snake Game for Gnome. I will use Clutter and JavaScript which is quite powerful combination, and I though to make some samples here, to enable people to write their own Gnome Apps.

I’ll make some tutorials, in image/text processing, event driven programming, effects / animations / timelines, drawing with Cairo and Cogl and finally a simple Graph Scene.

MATE, the open-source desktop environment whose name no one is sure how to pronounce, is now nearly a year old. Many of us never thought it would make it this far, but the interface has held own against competitors like Unity and GNOME Shell. But does MATE have a long-term future in the fast-evolving world of desktop Linux? Here are some thoughts.

Since Valve announced their official support for Steam into Linux platform, everyone is acting crazy. Quite recently, Valve’s boss – Mr.Gabe, said that “Windows 8 will be a catastrophe for PC game makers”. The next day, Blizzard’s vice president – Mr.Newell shared his thoughts via twitter saying that “I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space* – not awesome for Blizzard either”. The questions is …

Bridge 2012.8 is out. It was requested a lot, and now it's here: GRUB 2 is the default bootloader in Bridge Linux 2012.8. There are a few notes about this - first, the bootloader install should detect all operating systems on the system, but it will change the root kernel parameter of Arch installs with a vanilla kernel. There are quite a few changes: fixed the /etc/hosts file; fixed the Xfce X respawn error; fixed some mkinitcpio issues; fixed the installer; added French and Turkish language support in the installer.