In time for the X.Org 7.5 release (whenever that may come), David Airlie has put out new driver releases for nineteen of the X.Org video drivers. These aren't updates to the mainline ATI/AMD, Intel, or even NVIDIA drivers, but some of the drivers for less common graphics hardware.

FSF added a new project to High Priority Projects list: Writing free software drivers capable of 3D acceleration for the PowerVR engine. This is a critical project, because PowerVR is being used in many new and popular platforms, such as Android/Linux tablets and phones, and netbooks. Currently it requires proprietary drivers in order to access many video features.

It's been nearly seven months since I wrote my first article about ATI drivers and how they literally crippled my computer and my daily life (An Outcry For Improved ATI Linux Drivers). Last month, ATI had finally released their latest drivers which contains the new OpenGL component and AIGLX support (AMD 8.42 Linux Display Driver).

CSIRO will spend up to $5 million on a Linux-based high performance computing system to help boost research efforts at the Pawsey Centre for SKA Science in Perth.

There are several different drivers available for various ATI graphics cards in Mandriva Linux 2008 that may be of interest in certain situations. This entry concerns the free software set of drivers. Some notes on the proprietary drivers may be found further down this document.

NVIDIA has already released quite a few Linux drivers this year already that improve their VDPAU support and stabilize their OpenGL 3.0 implementation. Yesterday AMD had then released its first proprietary Linux driver of 2009 that brought OpenGL 3.0 support. While both sides are off to a good start, what else do you want to see from them and their drivers in 2009?

Brother is now developing drivers which are designed to work on Linux distributions, Redhat, Mandriva(Mandrake), SuSE, Debian and FedoraCore. We have developed two types of driver: LPR drivers and CUPS drivers.

Enhancements to the ALSA code for HD audio codecs, a V4L/DVB driver for the Mantis TV chip, drivers for MSI laptops and drivers for newer AMD CPUs are just some of the improvements to Linux hardware support.

Linux users are often at the mercy of hardware vendors when it comes to device drivers. The open source community often needs to turn to reverse engineering to churn out drivers from proprietary ones.