Last week prior to heading over to Germany for LinuxTag, I had ran a new set of ATI R500 Gallium3D benchmarks with an ATI Radeon X1950PRO graphics card and comparing the latest Mesa/Gallium3D graphics driver performance in the Mesa 7.9-devel Git code with both the Gallium3D and classic Mesa DRI drivers to the older Mesa stack found in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

When it comes to Intel's X.Org driver for Linux, xf86-video-intel, the most recent release was version 2.10 and it arrived in early January complete with Pineview (their next-generation Intel Atom systems) support, X-Video improvements, and various other features.

The Khronos Group announced version 1.1 of OpenCL, the multiprocessor programming standard. OpenCL 1.1 features a variety of enhancements, the one that really caught my eye was Improved OpenGL interoperability through efficient sharing of images and buffers by linking OpenCL event objects to OpenGL fence sync object. That'll come in handy.

Element is a lightweight Linux distribution for use on a home theater PC (HTPC). It comes with most of the same video-playback applications one would find in a modern desktop distribution, but the development team has put considerable effort into wrapping the applications in an environment that is easy to navigate from across the room...

When it comes to video playback on Linux, the premiere choice for video acceleration is currently using VDPAU with its CPU-efficient, GPU-accelerated capabilities that even has no problems playing 1080p video files with extremely low-end hardware.

The NVIDIA 180.44 Linux driver officially adds support for several new graphics processors, fixes various OpenGL crashes (including the KDE 4.x Plasma problems), adds support for OpenGL 3.0 floating-point depth buffers, and brings a number of VDPAU fixes.

Since the introduction of AMD's new Linux OpenGL driver and their open-source strategy running in parallel, the past few months have been especially exciting for ATI Linux users and the Linux graphics scene in general.

The most heated talk this year during FOSDEM in the X.Org development room was certainly the talk by Luc Verhaegen with his ambitions to clean up the Linux graphics driver stack. Building the entire X.Org stack can be a mess and there is certainly areas to improve upon in the development process and making it easier for end-users and others to test out this latest code.

Okay, so I have two machines running Amarok, the kick-ass audio player for linux. These machines are in separate locations, connected by a VPN link (the excellent and free Hamachi zero-conf VPN). I want to keep the back-end database and music in sync without expending a lot of effort. Scripts ahoy!