AMD and Linux Kernel

• Ataribox runs Linux on AMD chip and will cost at least $250

  Atari released more details about its Ataribox game console today, disclosing for the first time that the machine will run Linux on an Advanced Micro Devices processor and cost $250 to $300. In an exclusive interview last week with GamesBeat, Ataribox creator and general manager Feargal Mac (short for Mac Conuladh) said Atari will begin a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo this fall and launch the Ataribox in the spring of 2018. The Ataribox will launch with a large back catalog of the publisher’s classic games. The idea is to create a box that makes people feel nostalgic about the past, but it’s also capable of running the independent games they want to play today, like Minecraft or Terraria.

• Linux 4.14 + ROCm Might End Up Working Out For Kaveri & Carrizo APUs

  It looks like the upstream Linux 4.14 kernel may end up playing nicely with the ROCm OpenCL compute stack, if you are on a Kaveri or Carrizo system. While ROCm is promising as AMD's open-source compute stack complete with OpenCL 1.2+ support, its downside is that for now not all of the necessary changes to the Linux kernel drivers, LLVM Clang compiler infrastructure, and other components are yet living in their upstream repositories. So for now it can be a bit hairy to setup ROCm compute on your own system, especially if running a distribution without official ROCm packages. AMD developers are working to get all their changes upstreamed in each of the respective sources, but it's not something that will happen overnight and given the nature of Linux kernel development, etc, is something that will still take months longer to complete.

• Latest Linux kernel release candidate was a sticky mess

  Linus Torvalds is not noted as having the most even of tempers, but after a weekend spent scuba diving a glitch in the latest Linux kernel release candidate saw the Linux overlord merely label the mess "nasty". The release cycle was following its usual cadence when Torvalds announced Linux 4.14 release candidate 2, just after 5:00PM on Sunday, September 24th.

• Linus Torvalds Announces the Second Release Candidate of Linux Kernel 4.14 LTS

  Development of the Linux 4.14 kernel series continues with the second Release Candidate (RC) milestone, which Linus Torvalds himself announces this past weekend. The update brings more updated drivers and various improvements. Linus Torvalds kicked off the development of Linux kernel 4.14 last week when he announced the first Release Candidate, and now the second RC is available packed full of goodies. These include updated networking, GPU, and RDMA drivers, improvements to the x86, ARM, PowerPC, PA-RISC, MIPS, and s390 hardware architectures, various core networking, filesystem, and documentation changes.

Red Hat: ‘Hybrid Cloud’, University of Alabama, Red Hat Upgrades Ansible and Expectations

• Red Hat Rising: ‘Hybrid Cloud’ Is In Fashion, Says CEO Whitehurst

  Following a better-than-expected fiscal Q2 report this afternoon from Linux and open-source software distributor Red Hat (RHT), chief executive Jim Whitehurst was kind enough to talk with me by phone.

• University of Alabama at Birmingham Secures Research Data with Red Hat

  For the University of Alabama at Birmingham, research is a $500 million per year expenditure, so it’s critical that information is stored in a way that works for everyone while remaining secure. UAB, which conducts research in areas such as engineering, statistical genetics and genomics, chose Red Hat Ceph Storage for its expanding storage needs because of the solution’s flexibility.

• Red Hat Upgrades Ansible

• Red Hat handily tops Q2 earnings targets

  Red Hat reported better-than-expected second quarter earnings Monday, as strong subscription revenue growth continues to bolster the company's bottom line.

Ubuntu GNOME Shell in Artful: Day 14

One of the latest thing we wanted to work on as we highlighted on our previous posts is the notification for new emails or download experience on the Shell. We already do ship the KStatusNotifier extension for application indicator, but need a way to signal the user (even if you are not looking at the screen when this happens) for new emails, IM or download/copy progress. Andrea stepped up on this and worked with Dash to Dock upstream to implement the unity API for this. Working with them, as usual, was pleasing and we got the green flag that it’s going to merge to master, with possibly some tweaks, which will make this work available to every Dash to Dock users! It means that after this update, Thunderbird is handily showing the number of unread emails you have in your inbox, thanks to thunderbird-gnome-support that we seeded back with Sébastien.