We have just found out from AMD's John Bridgman that Alex Deucher, one of their open-source engineers, has today successfully rendered its first hardware-accelerated triangle on the Radeon HD 4800 series (RV770). In other words, the first open-source 3D milestone for this latest graphics card family from ATI! This is similar to back in March when there was the R500 glxgears milestone and coming two months after that was full 3D support with some Linux games running...

Last year ASUS had christened the Eee PC as a cost-effective but well built sub-notebook that ended up being extremely popular with more people than just computer enthusiasts. The original Eee PC 700 series had shipped with Intel Celeron hardware, a solid-state drive, and a Xandros-based Linux distribution. These units have been selling extremely well but back in June ASUS had unveiled the Eee 901 as well as the Eee 1000 series. These newer models now use Intel Diamondville-based Atom CPUs, which we have been quite fond of for their technological advances. In this article we are providing our first look at the Eee PC 901 along with a few bits of information and sharing some of our plans for the Eee Linux testing in the near future.

While NVIDIA's NVISION 3D conference is taking place this week, we have yet to hear anything in regards to Linux announcements. However, NVIDIA has updated its open-source driver...

Tungsten's Brian Paul has today announced the release of Mesa 7.1. New in this open-source library used by Linux graphics drivers for providing OpenGL support is autoconf-based configuration, assorted DRI driver enhancements, reduced dependencies between the X server and Mesa, GL_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension for Xlib driver, GLSL (GL Shading Language) support for the Intel 965, and ATI Radeon R500 (X1000) series support...

Back in May when X.Org developers were voicing concerns about Tungsten's TTM as being the kernel memory manager used for graphics drivers, Keith Packard had unveiled the work Intel had been doing for an alternate kernel memory manager. This memory manager they call GEM, or the Graphics Execution Manager, is a competing solution but it has some advantages such as being simpler to develop drivers around (A Technical Explanation of Intel's GEM)...

Intel's Jesse Barnes has today released the xf86-video-intel 2.4.97.0 driver. This is a test release that features integrated GEM memory manager and kernel-based mode-setting along with other improvements...

For those following the xf86-video-ati developments or use this open-source Radeon driver for their graphics card, you may want to check out the latest development code. Committed to its git branch today was a lot of new work from Alex Deucher, Dennis Kasprzyk, David Airlie, Egbert Eich, and Corbin Simpson. There is now bi-cubic X-Video support for the Radeon R300 and R500 series GPUs, heavy optimizations in the video functions, and lots of code cleaning...

Back in June we had looked at the Super Micro C2SBX+ motherboard, which was a workstation motherboard oriented around the Intel X48 Chipset. This was our first time reviewing a Super Micro product at Phoronix, but from the success of the C2SBX+ we decided to look at another one of their motherboards. This time around we have our hands on the Super Micro C2SEA, which is a desktop motherboard that uses the Intel G45 Chipset and provides integrated GMA X4500 HD graphics.

It's been only five days since the Phoronix Test Suite 1.2.0 Beta 2 release, but Beta 3 is now ready and has about 50 changes to this release. With a bit of luck, this will also be the last test release before Phoronix Test Suite 1.2 "Malvik" is officially released next week...

As a reminder, there's about a week and a half now until XDS 2008. The 2008 X Developers' Summit is taking place in Edinburgh, Scotland from the 3rd to 5th of September...

The Linux 2.6.26 kernel had featured updated Intel and ATI DRM that added the needed kernel support for the ATI R500 and Intel GMA 4500 3D support. While the merge window for the Linux 2.6.27 kernel has already closed, we will hopefully see a few more Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) patches...

XenSource today has announced the release of Xen 3.3.0. This update to this popular open-source virtual machine adds power management support to the hypervisor (the C and P states), HVM emulation domains, PVGrub, improved PV performance, improvements to the shadow page-table algorithm...

It's been four weeks since WINE 1.1.2 was released, but arriving today is the latest release in the WINE 1.1 development series. This release incorporates many more crypt32 functions, the start of DirectDraw overlay support, improved support for tables in Richedit, support for NETWM window maximization, many installer fixes, and tweaks for PulseAudio support...

Earlier this week with the release of the Catalyst 8.8 driver we were first to deliver Linux CrossFire benchmarks for the Radeon HD 4800 series along with the first OverDrive for Linux article. With our initial CrossFire for Linux article we had delivered benchmarks from the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870, now though we are delivering the first Radeon HD 4870 X2 benchmarks under Ubuntu Linux. In this article we have our hands on the VisionTek Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB graphics card.

Tuesday the NVIDIA 177.67 Display Driver was released and then yesterday the ATI Catalyst 8.8 Driver came out with OverDrive and CrossFire support. Today though we are back with another NVIDIA Linux driver release. Due to fallout from the 177.67 driver, NVIDIA has replaced it just two days later with the 177.68 Beta.

Mandriva 2009 Beta 2 has been released today. This testing update adds the Firefox 3 web-browser, OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta, switching to Fedora's system-config-printer, and many other changes too...

Generating buzz this morning with the release of the Linux 2.6.27-rc4 kernel is word that Ubuntu may switch to the Linux 2.6.27 kernel for their forthcoming 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex" release. Canonical's Ben Collins has proposed on the Ubuntu development mailing list that Intrepid be switched to using the Linux 2.6.27 kernel instead of using 2.6.26. The reasons for this expected switch so late in the development cycle is the updated mac80211, updated to ALSA 1.0.17 codecs, obtain Xen 64 para-virtualization, and use an updated version of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine...

In the traditional fashion of Linus Torvalds, with a week having passed since the Linux 2.6.27-rc3 kernel release, the 2.6.27-rc4 has been pushed out. The Linux 2.6.27-rc4 kernel has a new USB driver and an old USB driver being replaced by a new libusb version, which makes up more than half of the changes...

Back in June we had exclusively shared that CrossFire would be coming to Linux as part of their Radeon HD 4800 series strategy. CrossFire (or CrossFire X as it's now known) allows the graphics rendering workload to be split between multiple Radeon GPUs to deliver faster performance. Meanwhile, NVIDIA's multi-GPU technology known as SLI (Scalable Link Interface) has been supported on Linux since 2005. While AMD is still working to address some issues with their ATI Linux driver, they have been working hard on new features like CrossFire. How does this feature work though on Linux and does it deliver similar performance gains to their Windows driver? Today we have a full rundown on ATI CrossFire for Linux along with benchmarks from the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870.

When it comes to ATI hardware, one of the features we have been after for the longest time on Linux has been any overclocking support. Windows users have ATI's OverDrive at their disposal along with an arsenal of third-party utilities such as ATI Tool. NVIDIA also has various utilities for overclocking their graphics cards on Windows, but they also provide support for overclocking on Linux. Today though with the release of the Catalyst 8.8 Linux driver there is finally ATI OverDrive 5 support on Linux.