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Here's some new features and other upcoming work that may excite Linux enthusiasts in the Phoronix software/hardware playground...

Microsoft has signed a patent agreement with $28 billion Taiwanese original device manufacturer (ODM) Compal Electronics. With this tenth Android agreement, over half of all Android devices are now being made by companies that have signed Android-related licensing pacts with Microsoft, claims the company....

Released several weeks late due to malware attacks on kernel.org in August, the Linux 3.1 kernel is out now, with a variety of enhancements to performance, virtualization, and power management. It also includes support for near field communication (NFC), the OpenRISC open source CPU, Nintendo's Wii controller, and 3D acceleration with Nvidia GEForce graphics processor units (GPUs)....

The Wine development release 1.3.31 is now available.

The Web site http://www.kickstarter.com is an interesting place. Basically, it's a site that allows people to invest in various projects, giving people real money to develop an idea. Those ideas vary from film-making to programming video games, but the concept is the same regardless of the project.

While there are all kinds of interesting new performance and scalability bits in Linux 3.1, there is also something that you might not expect to see. The Linux 3.1 kernel officially includes a driver for the Nintendo Wii Remote.

Yes! After ten release candidates, Linus Torvalds marked a few minutes ago (October 24th) the Linux kernel 3.1 sources as final/stable and ready for immediate download.

It seems that the Firefox for mobile project is in full swing. With tablet support already underway, Firefox’s Android version will soon be getting a bunch of exciting new features. Planned for Firefox 10 are features like Flash Support, camera UI and safe browsing which will put the open source browser at par with competitors like Dolphin and Opera. Here’s a look at the features in a little more detail.

The day ICS(Ice Cream Sandwich – Android 4.0) will be made open-source is not too far. Once it is out, developers around the world(including OEMs like HTC, Samsung, Sony Ericcson) will start building the source code and start rolling out the update for android devices. But what bewilders me is the need for workstations with no lesser than 16 GB RAM to build the source code(I am not kidding). Ice Cream Sandwich is a Vampire that requires twice the amount of blood that GingerBread needed.

Two weeks ago AMD introduced the Bulldozer FX-Series CPUs to much excitement, although many were letdown by the initial results, and it was months after showing the first Linux benchmarks of an AMD Dual-Interlagos pre-production system. In the days that followed I delivered some initial AMD FX-4100 Linux benchmarks when securing remote access to a low-end Bulldozer system running Ubuntu 11.04 (and there were also some Linux benchmarks from independent Phoronix readers), but then last week a Bulldozer kit arrived from AMD. The centerpiece of this kit is an eight-core AMD FX-8150 CPU, which is now being used to conduct a plethora of AMD Bulldozer benchmarks on Linux.

Microsoft’s current strategy is to make Android more expensive by means of extortion, as last we mentioned just a few days ago. Or as Geek.com puts it, “Microsoft now earning royalties for every Kindle Fire sold?”

Earlier this month I wrote about the AMD porting their open-source Linux graphics driver to Windows EC7. Here's a few details that were learned in the past two weeks...

Canonical, through Allison Randal, announced on October 21st, that the next LTS (Long Term Support) versions of the Ubuntu operating system will be supported for 5 years.

The VideoJS HTML 5 video play is an all in one solution to your video problems. You have cross browser compatibility, both with your videos, and with the look and feel. This allows you to reach a wider audience.

Ubuntu 11.10, the latest stable release of the popular Linux distribution, sports two guest accounts, one in the login screen and the other accessible from an active user session. Both are tightly coupled to LightDM, the new display manager. The Ayatana Scrollbar is not new, but is a feature that many users seem to want disabled. This article shows how to disable the guest session and the overlay scrollbar, as the Ayatana Scrollbar is also called.

This tutorial is for turning a single disk CentOS 6 system into a two disk RAID1 system. The GRUB bootloader will be configured in such a way that the system will still be able to boot if one of the hard drives fails (no matter which one).

LXer Feature: 24-Oct-2011

Welcome to this week's collection of big stories from the LXer Newswire. Enjoy!

Google’s complaints about patent-based attacks against Android don’t seem to be doing the company any good. We all know Steve Jobs pledged to destroy Android, claiming it stole its ideas from Apple’s iOS. Yet what is likely an even bigger threat comes from Microsoft, which claims that more than half of all Android devices are now subject to patent licensing agreements.

The whole Linux community is based on the concept of community and collaboration. Without it, Linus Torvalds' e-mail sent out 20 years ago would have been forgotten and none of us would have known about Linux. As time went by, it became easier and easier for users, regardless of experience and knowledge, to contribute to his/her favorite distribution. While we're at it, it's a common misconception that you have to be a programmer in order to help the Linux community. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone can help, provided he or she has Internet access, and, more importantly, the will to help.