Our render farm is all open source and is quite substantial. We have roughly 1000 Linux nodes between the two facilities and the majority of our artists run on Linux as well, though we have a few Mac boxes for Photoshop and other packages that can’t run on Linux.

AMD Hawaii support works with GLAMOR (both with the external library and the internal support found in X.Org Server 1.16), is running a variety of Steam games, etc. As a word of caution, MSAA might be one of the currently broken Hawaii features unless additionally applying a libdrm patch. Among the titles people are reportedly trying with the Hawaii GPU on RadeonSI Gallium3D include Civilization 5, Half-Life 2, Metro: Last Light, Portal 2, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The performance on the open driver is said to be satisfactory in most situations but with XCOM for instance the frame-rate on a R9 290 class GPU is under ten frames per second and there's also issues with GPU stalls. A big problem reported by a user comes down to very poor performance in playback of video streams, such as from Twitch.

With the Android L set to roll out in a couple of months times, only two companies are definitely supporting the latest Google OS update.

Google confirmed during I/O 2014 that the the will release the next Android update later this year, and that is is currently code named “Android L.”

The curtains are up on GUADEC 2014, and the first keynote was delivered by Jim Hall. Jim is the Director of Information Technology at Morris, University of Minnesota, and he presented his work on usability in GNOME. We took some time to talk to Jim about his keynote and about his research on GNOME.

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The open source project OpenDaylight is on a mission to increase enterprise adoption of software-defined networking (SDN). Read about this ambitious effort to unite all SDN controllers.

Before heading into the weekend I thought about writing a small update about the KDecoration2 status. Since my last blog post I started integrating KDecoration2 into KWin. This was partially easier and partially more difficult than anticipated. Especially ripping out the old decoration code is rather complex. There are quite some design differences which make the transition complex and especially values inside KWin core are using enums defined in the decoration API – e.g. the maximized state is kept as a KDecorationDefines::MaximizedMode. This will need further work to move the enums and so at the moment the old decoration library is still compiled although the library is no longer in use.

Deepin is a rather interesting distribution of GNU/Linux. It’s especially useful if you haven’t tried out GNU/Linux before. Website makeuseof.com said recently: “It’ll be interesting to see how this distribution progresses… and seriously hope that it gets more popular because it definitely has the potential to be huge. More people just need to hear about it.”

Remember how the open source software movement was supposed to be like Woodstock, with everybody sharing and everything free? An entire economy where you gave a little to get a lot, in a place of love and software?

At the risk of bringing down your summer, it’s time to admit that this idea didn’t work out.

Take Big Switch Networks, a company that hoped to be for computer networking what Linux operating system software is for computer servers. A few years ago, Big Switch proposed building networking controller software that was crowd-created and free, which could demolish proprietary networking boxes. It would also offer a commercial version, with a few tweaks, that could be the basis of a great, profitable empire.

Complementing yesterday's Radeon, Intel, and Nouveau benchmarks using the very latest open-source driver code, here's some power consumption, performance-per-Watt, and thermal numbers when using an assortment of graphics processors on the latest open-source drivers.

An administrator responded on the OnePlus blog by giving a clear indication the One will eventually be available to buy in India. At launch (even though there was no official launch) the OnePlus One was only available in North America and Europe. However it now seems that India is one of the country’s most eager to purchase the device. According to the OnePlus blog India ranks eight in the world via traffic trying to obtain the device through the OnePlus site. If this is correct than this ranks India higher than a number of the countries the device was actually launched in.

I remember when I dove into Linux at full tilt boogie. It was 2004. Nickelback could still be found in the top 10 charts, The Boston Red Sox broke the Curse of the Bambino and wireless support in Linux absolutely sucked. What a long way we’ve come. So these days, when people gripe about this or that not working in Linux, most of those complaints seem almost trivial.

At Red Hat, we take pride in the fact that we actively contribute to the projects that are used to build our set of leading enterprise solutions. And when one project’s community is distinguished for their exemplary efforts – we want to recognize them as well.

As such, we are pleased to announce that the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has received the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) 2014 Programming Languages Software Award. Awarded to an institution or individuals that have developed a software system with lasting influence, the award recognizes GCC’s 27 years of success and the substantial impact it has had on the software industry, an example of which is its importance to modern datacenter operations.

Unlike Windows or Mac OS X, Linux offers a wide variety of desktop environments. Here are my picks of the most important of these PC interfaces.

Last week in Cambridge (UK) was the GNU Tools Cauldron 2014 conference where a number of interesting GCC-related talks took place, including greater collaboration between the GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler crews.

At this year's GNU Tools Cauldron is where it was discussed and decided upon that GCC 5.0 will be released in 2015 in place of the GCC 4.10 release.

Linus Torvalds' latest tirade is over the GCC 4.9 code compiler.

In a kernel mailing list thread about a random panic in a load balance function with the in-development Linux 3.16 kernel, Torvalds looked at the code being generated by GCC 4.9 and was disgusted with the output.

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