Despite the recent interest in adopting HTML5's video tag, there is still one major problem: there is no mandated standard video codec for the video tag. The two main contestants are the proprietary and patended h264, and the open and free Theora. In a comment on an LWN.net article about this problematic situation, LWN reader Trelane posted an email exchange he had with MPEG-LA, which should further cement Theora as the obvious choice.

David Airlie has called upon Linus to pull in a new set of DRM patches for the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, which should land with the Linux 2.6.33-rc7 release. These graphics patches for the Linux kernel bring a few fixes for TTM, Radeon DisplayPort tweaks, r600 blit mutex, and support for the VMware graphics driver with older versions of the VMware Workstation...

While KDE SC 4.4 RC2 should have been the last release candidate for the KDE 4.4 Software Compilation, a third and final release candidate has been offered. The KDE SC 4.4 release managers deemed another RC necessary after bugs (and fixes) continued to flow in following the RC2 release. The KDE SC 4.4 RC3 release announcement can be read at KDE.org...

While the iPad can certainly be debated as a product, people on the internet are discussing not the product, but the shift devices like the iPhone and iPad represent: a shift away from a computer being accessible to it being something closed and impenetrable. Is this a future we want for ourselves?

Mozilla announced that the final Firefox for Mobile (& Fennec& ) 1.0 release is now available for Nokia’s Maemo Linux-based N810 tablet and N900 phone -- but with a & YouTube Enabler& in place of Flash. Meanwhile, the Android pre-alpha of version of Fennec may arrive as early as next month, says a report....

Months after the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series (known by the "Evergreen" family codename) was introduced, AMD has finally pushed out the first bits of open-source code. This morning if you are to checkout the xf86-video-ati DDX driver branch there is initial user-space mode-setting support for the Radeon HD 5000 series GPUs...

While Red Hat is busy at work on Fedora 13 and Canonical is busy working on their Long-Term Support release of Ubuntu 10.04, Novell is working on openSUSE 11.3. This next upgrade to openSUSE is due out in mid-July, but the first milestone release is now available. Milestone 1 of openSUSE 11.3 pulls in the latest GNOME 2.30 development packages and the release candidate of KDE 4.4 Software Compilation...

For the past several days benchmarks have been going on a plethora of ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 (R600/700 generation) graphics cards as well as some of the older Radeon X1000 (R500) hardware for reference. All of this testing has been done with the current open-source ATI driver stack with Mesa to show where the performance is at for the H1'2010 Linux distributions...

Use gnuplot to dynamically generate Web pages from your system using raw data to provide graphic images. This raw data typically contains MIS-related information, on system performance, storage, or database growth.

Phoronix Media has announced the immediate release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 (codenamed "Lenvik"), as the latest update to their open-source testing framework that delivers immediate and measurable advantages to its customers. The Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 software is compatible with a greater number of operating systems, introduces support for mobile platforms, offers a new range of test profiles, and other features to further solidify its premiere position within the computer benchmarking industry.

Just yesterday morning we reported on hybrid graphics coming to Linux in a crude form, which allowed dual-GPU notebook systems to switch between the onboard GPUs via a kernel patch but what made it crude was that it wasn't seamless switching within the running X.Org Server (it won't be this way for some time) and it didn't actually turn off the other GPU when the other one was in use. In the past 24 hours, however, David Airlie has published three new versions of this Linux kernel patch. The second version of Airlie's "switcheroo" code as it's called brought support for powering up and powering down the GPUs...

Back in December of 2008 VMware acquired Tungsten Graphics, the company that's principally behind Mesa 3D along with the Gallium3D driver architecture, the TTM memory manager, and other parts of the Linux graphics stack. A year later (this past November/December) we then found out VMware had them create a virtual Gallium3D driver for their VMware virtualization platform so that virtualized operating systems can exploit the graphics processor on the host system just not for driving OpenGL support, but OpenCL, OpenVG, OpenGL ES, and other areas covered now by the Gallium3D state tracker and going into the future (VDPAU, etc). One of the latest branches appearing for Gallium3D is coming from VMware's José Fonseca...

The past three releases of Ubuntu Linux have included unreleased ATI Catalyst drivers. It started with Ubuntu 8.10, which got an early-access driver as the official Catalyst Linux driver that was available to the public at the time had not supported X Server 1.5...

Jean Delvare has announced the second point release for the LM_Sensors 3.1 series, which was introduced last March. The LM_Sensors 3.1.2 release delivers better Linux system sensor monitoring support by preemptively adding support for future kernels and HID devices in libsensors, the sensord daemon has received a lot of clean-ups, and sensors-detect is better detecting the supported sensors with drivers. The LM_Sensors 3.1.2 release announcement can be found on the project's mailing list...

XvMC support came to Gallium3D through a Google Summer of Code project for 2008 that involved getting X-Video Motion Compensation running atop the Nouveau driver with NVIDIA hardware. We described this work in The State Of Gallium3D Video Decoding and subsequently in Nouveau's Gallium3D Driver Gets Video Boost...

The beauty of the internet is such that every opinion has become worthless; this goes doubly so for those with publish buttons on (relatively, we're humble) major websites. For every opinion, there's a matching counter-opinion, and that's great. Yesterday, we linked to an article by Mark Pilgrim about tinkerers and the iPad, and of course, someone was bound to disagree with that one.

While there is now DRM support in the Linux 2.6.33 kernel for the Nouveau driver that carries the bits for kernel mode-setting, 2D (EXA) acceleration, and other fundamental functions on NVIDIA graphics processors, the Gallium3D driver still is incomplete. Prior to focusing solely on Gallium3D for their OpenGL acceleration, the Nouveau project was working on a DRI driver for classic Mesa, but that work was dropped in 2008 to focus entirely on Gallium3D support...

"The notion of a Firefox smartphone browser seemed implausible only a few short years ago, but today it's very much a reality. Firefox Mobile for Maemo demonstrates the flexibility of the Firefox Web browser and its potential to bring a desktop-like browsing experience to constrained computing environments. It is truly an impressive achievement, but it's only the beginning of what Mozilla hopes to accomplish on handheld devices. Stay tuned for our follow-up about Weave, in which we will examine some of the opportunities for innovation created by Firefox Mobile."

Two days ago we reported on hybrid graphics coming to Linux in a crude form that allowed switching between graphics processors on notebook computers that utilize dual graphics processors, one that's meant to deliver the best energy efficient performance while the other GPU is for maximizing the graphics performance in demanding environments. Just 24 hours after this kernel patch hit the Internet it already went through four revisions by Red Hat's David Airlie, which delivered better switching and greater notebook compatibility...

Kristian Høgsberg, the mastermind behind DRI2 and the one behind the Wayland Display Server, has a new announcement and that's a DRI2 driver for the new Mesa EGL implementation. Kristian's work interfaces EGL with DRI2 and is described as a "nice, self-contained implementation." Kristian has aspirations to add support for EGL with a DRI2 driver on the KMS frame-buffer, which could be used in the Wayland world. Kristian previously wrote the Eagle EGL stack as part of his work on Wayland, but those Eagle-specific bits have been dropped after Gallium3D received a new EGL state tracker and Kristian has merged some Eagle bits with Mesa. Kristian's announcement concerning this DRI2 driver for EGL can be read on mesa3d-dev...

Ah, the ARM chip. ARM is a hugely successful architecture, and can be found in just about every cell phone or other small device out there. ARM, however, wants more, and for a long time now we've been hearing predictions about an upcoming massive rise in ARM netbooks - so far, this hasn't materialised. Warren East, ARM's CEO, said in an interview with PC Pro that netbooks could one day make up 90% of the laptop market - preferably powered by ARM processors of course.

China-based HiVision is readying an Android-based & PWS700CA& netbook with a 600MHz Rockchip ARM9 processor and a 7-inch, WVGA touchscreen, and according to one preview, it's likely to sell for under $100. HiVision also recently introduced a Linux-based & PWS700B& netbook, as well as an & EB-0600S& e-reader, says the company....

"As the Android kernel code is now gone from the Linux kernel, as of the 2.6.33 kernel release, I'm starting to get a lot of questions about what happened, and what to do next with regards to Android. So here's my opinion on the whole matter."

Broadcom announced broad adoption of Bluetooth 3.0 across its silicon, software, and combo chip solutions. Separately, Samsung is set to release what appears to be the world's first Bluetooth 3.0-equipped phone, according to the Bluetooth SIG (special interest group)....

Symbian has completed the process of open sourcing its entire code base, in advance of its June deadline. While the release is ahead of schedule, the first phones - expected to be out early next year - will hit the market more than two years after the first Android phone became available. The code is expected to become available on the Symbian developer page on Thursday.