G3ckoG33k writes "Openbenchmarking.org has received 37,027 benchmarks (mainly Linux, and some Macs) in the first week since its inauguration. 241,384 completed tests using 468,344 components from 438 hardware vendors. All results submitted by end users. I guess the hardware support for Linux must become even better thanks to this effort. Yes, the benchmarks are easy to install and run, and you can readily compare your own system anonymously with the results already submitted, using any or all of hundreds of free applications in 47 categories."

An anonymous reader writes "AMD has done a big code drop providing Fusion support for Coreboot, the project that once was called LinuxBIOS for providing an open source BIOS implementation." A lack of vendor support has long made the task of the coreboot developers difficult. Support for what is slated to be a common chipset is pretty encouraging, and will hopefully make it easier to run an entirely Free Software system for diehards like RMS.

mvar writes to point out a report from h-online about the Red Hat kernel source controversy. From the article: "Red Hat has changed the way it ships the source code for the Linux kernel. Previously, it was released as a standard kernel with a collection of patches which could be applied to create the source code of the kernel Red Hat used. Now though, the company ships a tarball of the source code with the patches already applied. This change, noted by Maxillian Attems and LWN.net, appears to be aimed at Oracle, who like others, repackage Red Hat's source as the basis for its Unbreakable Linux. Although targeted at Oracle, the changes will make work harder for distributions such as CentOS."

t14m4t writes "While the Linux experience has improved dramatically over the years (remember the days of Kernel version 2.0? or even 1.2?), Tech Republic revisits some of the more-fondly-remembered artifacts of the Linux of years past. From the article: 'Of all the admin tools I have used on Linux, the one I thought was the best of the best was linuxconf. From this single interface, you could administer everything — and I mean EVERYTHING — on your Linux box. From the kernel on up, you could take care of anything you needed. With the dumbing down of the Linux operating system (which was actually a necessity for average user acceptance), tools like this have disappeared. It’s too bad. An admin tool like this was ideal for serious administrators and users.'"

doperative writes "A consultant hired by SCO in 2004 to compare UNIX and Linux, with the thought he could be used as an expert at trial, says that, after days and days, his comparison tool found 'very little correlation'. When he told that to SCO, it paid him and he never heard from SCO again."

alphadogg writes "For those who feel like Linux and open source have been slighted by Tinseltown in the face of its embrace of Facebook and The Social Network, you'll be heartened to know that the Father of Linux, Linux Torvalds, and his wife Tove were among the beautiful people at Saturday's pre-Oscars Night Before Party in Beverly Hills. Torvalds blogged about the Oscars party experience Monday, recounting a series of awkward encounters with movie stars."

An anonymous reader writes "AMD has open sourced X-Video Bitstream Acceleration, their API by which they expose the Universal Video Decoder 2 GPU under Linux." They may be a little late with this move, and not everything you could wish is now open source, but it's better than nothing.

mtaht writes, "After a very intense month of development, the Bufferbloat project has announced the debloat-testing git kernel tree, featuring (via suggestion of Van Jacobson) a wireless network latency smashing algorithm, (called eBDP), the SFB and CHOKe packet schedulers, and a slew of driver level fixes that reduce network latency across the Linux kernel by over 2 orders of magnitude. Got Bloat?"