Following the 280.04 beta and 280.11 beta, NVIDIA has just made the 280 Linux driver series official with the certified release of the 280.13 build. The NVIDIA 280.13 build doesn’t offer up too much for x86/x86_64 Linux beyond what was already found in the 280.11 beta build. However, there are some changes compared to the [...]

As has been pointed out in the forums, the AMD Catalyst 11.7 Linux driver for Radeon and FirePro graphics hardware has been released this morning. What new features does this proprietary driver bring? Well, it does bring support for the Linux 2.6.39/3.0 kernels. The Linux 2.6.39 kernel is at least being reported to work with [...]

While NVIDIA is already in the middle of working on the 280 driver series and there’s been a public beta of that, this Friday morning NVIDIA has released a new 275.xx stable release. While this release is still tagged in the 275 series, it does contain a few worthwhile fixes and new hardware enablement. The [...]

Joining John Bridgman and Alex Deucher in working on the open-source driver stack at AMD are two new, but familiar, names: Michel Dänzer and Christian König. These two Linux graphics driver developers are now officially AMD employees. These two hires are concerning AMD’s recent open-source hiring efforts. Some developers and I have known who these [...]

AMD has this afternoon released the Catalyst 11.6 Linux driver. The Catalyst 11.6 for Linux build isn’t particularly exciting. Release notes for the 11.6 driver haven’t been made publicly available yet, but if they do emerge, they’ll basically say there’s installer/uninstaller improvements, support for reading the highest available memory clock from AMDCCCLE, and some other [...]

The NVIDIA crew working on their proprietary Linux driver have just pre-released a new build, NVIDIA 270.41.03. This Linux driver update mainly adds support for a number of new GeForce / Quadro GPUs. The list of newly supported hardware is huge: GeForce GT 520, GeForce GT 525M, GeForce GT 520M, GeForce GT 445M, GeForce GT [...]

Now that I finally have Sandy Bridge graphics working under Linux, thanks to another H67 motherboard and Core i5 2500K processor from Intel that don’t exhibit the earlier problems, there’s many Linux benchmarks available. Overall the Core i5 2500K graphics under Linux with the latest kernel / DDX / Mesa are fast, for being Intel [...]

AMD has just issued their Catalyst 11.2 Linux driver update. It’s now available from AMD.com but their release notes as usual are of little use, so here’s the Phoronix scoop on this month’s update. Within Catalyst 11.2 you should find: – A much smaller driver package. The unified x86/x86_64 driver package available from AMD’s web-site [...]

VIA’s small Linux development community is badly fragmented; there is yet another group of developers creating their own VIA driver. I wish it was a joke, seeing as there are already a number of drivers for the same VIA chipsets and none of them are feature complete or in really great condition, but a new [...]

If you use the open-source ATI Linux graphics driver, there’s a major stable update available. At long last, xf86-video-ati 6.14.0 has been released. This open-source X.Org driver brings official support for the Radeon HD 5000 series, Radeon HD 6000 series, and AMD Fusion Ontario hardware. This release also has a plethora of bug-fixes and flips [...]

While NVIDIA puts out beta Linux graphics drivers quite often as a means of soliciting testing prior to declaring a new stable GPU driver update, AMD does not but rather they rely upon their NDA-covered select beta testers to put each Catalyst release through its paces before declaring a stable update in their timed monthly [...]

On Friday the NVIDIA engineers working on their proprietary Linux driver put out a new driver update. This new driver update is marked NVIDIA 260.19.36 Certified, but it brings just three official changes. The NVIDIA 260.19.36 driver updates the NVIDIA kernel module to now ensure that all system memory allocated by it for either the [...]

If “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!” summed up all that was wrong in Jan’s world on “The Brady Bunch” all those many decades ago, an equivalent for today’s computing world might be, “tablets, tablets, tablets!” After all, the widely hyped new devices pretty well dominated the news coming out of CES, and they continue to do so [...]

One key area of frustration for newcomers to the Linux OS is using document scanners. Most hardware makers do not provide Linux drivers on discs that accompany their scanner models. So Linux users have to struggle to find solutions on distro-specific help forums. Linux does not support the TWAIN-compatible drivers popular in the Windows world. [...]

With our big AMD Linux GPU / driver comparison we found its open-source Gallium3D driver to be noticeably faster than the classic Mesa DRI driver across an array of Radeon hardware from multiple generations. However, the official Catalyst driver was multiple times faster (roughly 5.18x faster) than the Gallium3D driver, not to mention its lack [...]

For those that were hoping that VIA Technologies would pull through in providing their open-source graphics driver support like they had promised with kernel mode-setting, a Gallium3D driver, and being Linux friendly, kiss those thoughts goodbye as they’ve been basically thrown out the window. Sadly, it’s not happening. I had a very productive conversation with [...]