The first milestone release of openSUSE 11.4, which will be released in March of 2011, is now available. The openSUSE 11.3 release came in July and since then for openSUSE 11.4 the Novell and community developers have pulled in X.Org Server 1.9, GNOME 2.32 Beta 1, KDE Software Compilation 4.5, and many other package updates...

Two years ago we compiled a list of the top contributors to the X Server over the years and that was followed by compiling a similar list of the developers behind Mesa. Tiago Vignatti has now compiled some statistics surrounding the top contributors to X.Org Server 1.9 and related X components just looking at this most recent development cycle. There's also numbers for the input, video, and Mesa components too...

Pawel Jakub Dawidek has announced he has prepared a port of the ZFS v28 file-system for FreeBSD, which is a newer revision of this advanced Sun/Oracle file-system than what is currently available in FreeBSD 8.1. This updated ZFS file-system brings a number of new features to FreeBSD-ZFS users including data de-duplication support, triple parity RAIDZ (RAIDZ3), ZFS DIFF, Zpool Split, snapshot holds, forced Zpool imports, and the ability to import a pool in a read-only mode...

Back in July we reported that Unigine Corp, the company behind the advanced Unigine gaming/3D engine, was working on its own strategy game. This game was supposed to be announced by the end of July, then in private we were told it got pushed back to the middle of August, but to start off September we finally have the announcement for this new game. Unigine OilRush is the game title and it will be available for Linux. Will this be the best Linux native game we see in 2010?

For the past three years we have hosted an annual Linux Graphics Survey in which we ask tens of thousands of users each time their video card preferences, driver information, and other questions about their view of the Linux graphics stack. This year we are hosting the survey once again to allow the development community to get a better understanding of the video hardware in use, what open-source and closed-source drivers are being used, and other relevant information that will help them and the Linux community.

Mesa 7.9 has shaped up to be one hell of a release with many new features and improvements throughout this open-source graphics software stack. For those that have been waiting for this to be officially released, there's good news and that is Mesa 7.9 should be released by the end of September...

Collabora, the open-source consulting company that's notably backing the development of GStreamer, PiTiVi, and Telepathy, among others, is now supporting a new per-window VNC system too. Thomas Thurman of Collabora has just announced the first public release of xzibit which offers a few features now, but Thurman has much greater plans ahead for this free software project...

The KDE team has announced the release of KDE Software Compilation 4.5.1 less than a month after the release of KDE SC 4.5.0...

Earlier this month there was the release of Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 as the last likely release of this OpenSolaris + Ubuntu Hardy mix to be based upon the original OpenSolaris Nevada code-base with Oracle killing the project so now they have the Illumos OpenSolaris fork to utilize. Today there's another OpenSolaris community OS release, this time in the form of SchilliX, which is the OpenSolaris derivative created by two German developers...

Over the weekend there was a new Linux binary driver release from NVIDIA that was the 256.52 driver in a pre-release state. It didn't deliver on OpenCL 1.1, Fermi Linux overclocking support, or any other radical features, but it did bring a handful of bug-fixes. Today this driver has been released as stable after being branded the NVIDIA 256.53 driver...

The Q3'2010 update to the Phoronix Test Suite introduces new test profiles, provides new analytics capabilities, supports testing under a more diverse selection of hardware and software, and provides numerous other features for those looking to deploy this leading automated testing platform within enterprise environments.

The developers behind XBMC have announced their first beta release of XBMC 10.0, which is codenamed Dharma. After being in development for a number of months, this open-source multi-media project hopes they soon will be announcing the final release of XBMC 10.0...

Last week we reported that a native ZFS implementation for Linux is soon being released that is based upon the work by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to bring Sun's ZFS file-system to Linux as a CDDL-licensed kernel module. As said though in that article, there is already a ZFS module for FUSE (File-system in User-space) that is already available and with it not living in the GPL-land of the Linux kernel, it is legally allowed, but it does not come without some performance overhead. Over the weekend though there's been some discussions in the related forum thread and elsewhere about the dependability of ZFS-FUSE and what the level of impact on using FUSE really amounts to in real-world usage. We have tested the ZFS-FUSE -- both the latest stable and Git snapshots -- and have compared this alternate ZFS Linux implementation to that of the native EXT4 and Btrfs.

Linus Torvalds has just done a Sunday afternoon release of the Linux 2.6.36-rc3 kernel. With the merge window for the Linux 2.6.36 kernel having closed a few weeks ago, the third 2.6.36 release candidate isn't too exciting unless you were affected by one of the kernel's outstanding bugs...

It was just earlier this month that we were talking about Lightspark now rendering faster and supporting H263/MP3 video when the first Lightspark 0.4.3 release candidate was made available. This open-source project that only reached beta in May aims to provide a completely free software implementation of Adobe's Flash/SWF specification, continues to advance rapidly. Lightspark 0.4.3 was already released and this morning the 0.4.4 release has even made it out the door...

Just shy of a month ago was when NVIDIA last released a proprietary Linux driver, at which point they also released a second driver that was their OpenGL 4.1 preview driver. This Saturday though NVIDIA has provided a new driver release, which is tagged as the 256.52 pre-release. This new Linux driver release isn't overly exciting, but it does carry some prominent fixes that will please some NVIDIA customers...

Earlier this month Canonical introduced its own multi-touch framework for Ubuntu that is set to premiere with Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" and it's called UTouch and is joined by their own gesture/touch language. That same day as announcing UTouch for Ubuntu that will support devices like the Apple Magic TrackPad and Dell XT2, Canonical proposed the X.Org Gesture Extension to the X.Org development community. While it's good to see Canonical making more contributions to upstream projects that it depends upon for Ubuntu Linux, the X.Org Gesture Extension is already being re-evaluated and may in fact not be needed...

Earlier this month we delivered benchmarks comparing the ZFS, EXT4, and Btrfs file-systems from both solid-state drives and hard drives. The EXT4 file-system was the clear winner in terms of the overall disk performance while Btrfs came in second followed by Sun's ZFS in FreeBSD 8.2. It was a surprise that in our most recent testing the EXT4 file-system turned around and did better than the next-generation Btrfs file-system, but it turns out that Btrfs regressed hard in Linux 2.6.35 as to be found in Ubuntu 10.10 and other soon-to-be-released distributions. However, regardless of where Btrfs is performing, its speed can be boosted by enabling its transparent zlib compression support.

Following this morning's article entitled Native ZFS Is Coming To Linux Next Month where the work by a small company from India that ported ZFS to Linux as a native kernel module was discussed, we heard from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. As was mentioned in today's ZFS article, the LLNL received a contract from the United States Department of Energy to port Sun's ZFS file-system to Linux...

Prior to the emergence of Btrfs as a viable next-generation Linux file-system, Sun's ZFS file-system was sought after for Linux due to its advanced feature-set and capabilities compared to EXT3 and other open-source file-systems at the time. While ZFS support has worked its way into OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and other operating systems, ZFS had not been ported to Linux as its source-code is distributed under the CDDL license, which is incompatible with the GNU GPL barring it from integration into the mainline Linux kernel. Next month, however, a working ZFS module for the Linux kernel without a dependence on FUSE will be publicly released.