Linux News Roundup

It does help to get a few the the more interesting stories in one place, so let me give you your extra-brief Linux News Roundup!

I know, I’ve been scooped on these.  What can I tell you?  I’m not a professional reporter.  Still, enjoy…

• The Future of Compiz is in question. Kristian Lyngstol makes some observations on the direction of Compiz.  Because of lack of leadership, Compiz has stagnated, and unless a new direction is establshed, Compiz may lose all of its developers as development effort scatters.
• Linux kernel 2.6.28 is out. The biggest new features are the GEM, a GPU memory manager that promises to give a significant improvement in graphics peformance, ext4, a new filesystem that is backwards-compatible with the venerable ext3, but adds support for bigger filesystems and files as well as support for new features like extents and faster fscks.  Ars Technica has a first look at the new kernel.
• AMD released specifications, as well as sample and example code for programming the ATI R600/700 GPUs. It’s nothing for end users yet, but it’s everything that developers need for getting those GPUs to do things like 3-D rendering and acceleration.  It’s quite significant in that it’s everything required to get those GPUs fully supported using open-source drivers in Linux.  Hopefully, before long, those drivers will be implemented in X.org and the Linux kernel.
• Andrew Min tells us Why Games are the Key to Linux Adoption. More precisely, the lack of modern and popular games on Linux is holding us back.  We have everything else – friendly desktops and applications, office suites, development, and so on.  And Linux is perfectly capable of running modern games on modern hardware.  It’s just that hardly anyone ports Windows games to Linux.  And that holds us back because users want their games.  WINE has closed the gap slightly, but its never going to be perfect, and there will always be a large number of games that break when it is used.  Maybe if Red Hat and Canonical spent a some money and funded some development teams to port and maintain a few popular games.  They don’t have to be open source.  They just have to work in Linux without too much hassle.  As Min mentioned, gamers are adventurous folks who do things like building their own systems.  Get them to adopt Linux, and you could start some decent momentum.