...in this article we are benchmarking the AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA binary drivers on Ubuntu Linux.

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For this article we benchmarked Ubuntu 14.04 in its current development state and compared it to the Ubuntu releases going back three years to Ubuntu 11.10.

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3D printers may be trendy, but they are hardly new. One of the earliest of all is the RepRap project, which began back in 2005. As its name implies - it's short for "replicating rapid" prototyper - RepRap is designed to be able to produce copies of itself, or at least most of its parts. Not only that, it is completely open source, both in terms of its hardware (which uses Arduino kit) and software.

Because of its open nature it has gone on to form the basis of many other 3D-printing systems, including those from MakerBot.

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Most companies may not realize it, but a huge part of the infrastructure that they run on today is actually built on open source hardware and software. In fact, if you think about Google, Facebook and a lot of the large social media delivery companies, they no longer sell you the software, it is an open source software, because the value proposition is the service on top of those tools, not the value that is on the tool. Beyond that, they see a huge community of individuals who can contribute to moving that technology forward, with the focus on the service delivered, not the technology below it.

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Other changes for today's NVIDIA 334.21 Linux driver update include a NVIDIA kernel module security fix for a userspace pointer dereference, OpenGL bug-fixes, support for GPUs with VDPAU feature set E, improved application profile support, improved performance of OpenGL applications when used in conjunction with the X driver's composition pipeline, NVIDIA Settings control panel updates, and other fixes.

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Digia announced Qt Enterprise Embedded in October as a commercial distribution for enterprises. Like the Qt 5.2 cross-platform framework it’s based on, Qt Enterprise Embedded supports Android, as well as Linux. The platform combines Qt’s drag-and-drop GUI builder with an IDE based on Qt Creator and Ubuntu, as well as a Boot to Qt embedded stack for Android and Linux targets.

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This week during Mobile World Congress 2014, Buffalo Americas launched three high speed AirStation Open Source DD-WRT wireless routers: the AirStation AC 1750 WZR-1750DHPD, the AirStation N600 WZR-600DHP2D, and the AirStation N300 WHR-300HP2D. The AC 1750 model is on sale now, while the other two won't arrive until early March.

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The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 is a great value graphics card for $120 that delivers great mid-range performance while its performance-per-Watt is exceptional. If you don't mind using binary graphics drivers, the GTX 750 based upon NVIDIA's new Maxwell architecture with the GM107 is worth checking out.

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The community of open source mobile developers around the world are a vocal bunch – and here at Broadcom we’ve heard their call.

To date, there’s been a dearth of documentation and vendor-developed open source drivers for the graphics subsystems of mobile systems-on-a-chip (SoC). Binary drivers prevent users from fixing bugs or otherwise improving the graphics stack, and complicate the task of porting new operating systems to a device without vendor assistance.

But that’s changing, and Broadcom is taking up the cause.

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PLDA has launched an SODIMM-like computer-on-module claimed to be the smallest Xilinx Zynq COM yet, supported with a carrier board and Debian Linux BSP

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That "blob" is the closed source driver code that the Pi requires today. "In common with every other mobile graphics core, using the VideoCore IV 3D graphics core on the Pi requires a block of closed-source binary driver code (a 'blob') which talks to the hardware," Upton wrote. "Our existing open-source graphics drivers are a thin shim running on the ARM11, which talks to that blob via a communication driver in the Linux kernel. The lack of true open-source graphics drivers and documentation is widely acknowledged to be a significant problem for Linux on ARM, as it prevents users from fixing driver bugs, adding features and generally understanding what their hardware is doing."

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Newark Element14′s $79, Linux-ready “SAMA5D3 Xplained” SBC showcases Atmel’s SAMA5D3 processor, with features like dual LAN ports and Arduino compatibility.

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The folks at UK-based Cloudsto have added a new device to their range of small, ARM-based Linux computers.

The Rikomagic MK902 LE is a small box with a Rockchip quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and up to 16GB of storage. It ships with Ubuntu Linux, and it’s available from the Cloudsto shop for £94.99 and up, or about $159.

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After running through some challenges in setting up PC-BSD/FreeBSD 10.0 and its many changes, here are benchmarks of the feature-rich operating system update. Benchmarks were done on the same laptop of PC-BSD 10.0, the former PC-BSD 9.2 release, and Ubuntu 13.10.

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In my last article on next-gen filesystems, we did something in between a generic high altitude overview of next-gen filesystems and a walkthrough of some of btrfs' features and usage. This time, we're going to specifically look at what ZFS brings to the table, walking through getting it installed and using it on one of the more popular Linux distributions: Precise Pangolin. That's the most current Long Term Service (LTS) Ubuntu release.

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Back on Tuesday I delivered a launch-day review of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti on Linux. This first graphics card built on NVIDIA's new Maxwell architecture has been running fantastic under Linux for being a mid-range graphics card. The GM107 GPU core found on the GTX 750 Ti is incredibly power efficient, as was shown in numerous articles on launch-day. For those curious more about the GeForce GTX 750 Ti Linux performance, here are some more OpenCL and OpenGL performance results.

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Broadwell support has been a work-in-progress on Linux for many months and most of the hardware enablement is complete. The Mesa driver has had mainline support for Intel Broadwell graphics for some time now, but only today is it being enabled by default and not hidden behind the Intel preliminary hardware support flag. The latest Broadwell work was with this commit and other changes.

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AS you may know, just few weeks ago OSHWA published the results from 2013 Open Hardware Community survey. You can find original datasheets and everything here. Despite raw data is good, I thought it was good to spend some time looking at the data trying to gather more insights, when possible, still keeping in mind that the survey samples a very limited and polarized (OSHWA centric) chunk of the community. But we need to start from something in a way.

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Early Linux 3.14 kernel benchmarks indicated there might be some slowdowns in disk/file-system performance for this next major kernel release. That early testing was done from an Intel ultrabook with solid-state drive while we're now in the process of carrying out more focused testing of Linux 3.14 on both HDDs and SSDs. In this article are our first hard drive benchmarks from the Linux 3.14 Git kernel compared to the stable 3.12 and 3.13 kernels.

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The first is the Hachiko development board for the Renesas RZ/A microcontroller, which is an ARM Cortex-A9-based MCU. This is positioned as a low end design board for applications such as door entry phones, barcode scanners and data communication modules.

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