SmartOS is an open-source UNIX-like operating system based on illumos, a community fork of OpenSolaris. It features four technologies - ZFS (a combined file system and logical volume manager), DTrace (a dynamic tracing framework for troubleshooting kernel and application problems), Zones (a lightweight virtualisation solution), KVM and bhyve (two full virtualisation solutions for running a variety of guest operating systems, including Linux, Windows, BSD and Plan9). SmartOS is designed to be particularly suitable for building clouds and generating appliances.

It's been a while since running benchmarks of the Liquorix kernel as an enthusiast-tailored downstream version of the Linux kernel focused on responsiveness for gaming, audio/video production, and other creator/enthusiast workloads. In today's article is a look at how the latest Liquorix kernel derived from Linux 6.18 is competing against the upstream Linux 6.18 LTS kernel on the same system.

On Monday at CES Intel announced Panther Lake as Core Ultra Series 3 with the initial laptop designs to be available for pre-order starting the following day, 6 January, while global availability is expected around 27 January. Now a few days after pre-orders opened up, few options are available and some of the models will not be shipping until mid-February...

A NVIDIA engineer restructuring some of the printf-related code within the memory resource controller "memcg" statistics printing code to reduce the system time by 11% for dumping those stats...

Pentoo is a Gentoo-based Linux live CD with a selection of applications and tools designed to perform penetration testing.

The Linux kernel developers for months now have been debating proposed guidelines for tool-generated submissions to the Linux kernel. As part of the "tools", the main motivator for this documentation has been around the era of AI and large language models with coding assistants and more. Torvalds made some remarks on the Linux kernel mailing list around his belief in focusing the documentation on "tools" rather than explicitly focusing on AI, given the likelihood of AI-assisted contributions continuing regardless of documentation...

The modern Intel Xe kernel graphics driver was designed from the start to be more broadly compatible with non-x86 architectures given their discrete graphics processors being front and center, unlike the legacy i915 kernel graphics driver being very x86 minded. While this allows running Intel Arc Graphics on ARM or RISC-V, there are some other kinks still being ironed out with using Intel graphics in the non-x86 world. One of those limitations currently being worked through is the lack of GPU firmware updating on non-x86 systems...

Sent out today was the latest batch of drm-misc-next changes to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle. The reverse-engineered Etnaviv DRM driver for Vivante graphics/NPU hardware has added a new "PPU flop reset" feature gleaned off studying the downstream vendor kernel driver...

To allow for additional security hardening of the Linux kernel, a patch series has been updated more than one year later to link the relocatable x86_64 kernel as Position Independent Executable (PIE) code...

BlueOnyx is a server distribution based on AlmaLinux OS. It is the mission of BlueOnyx to provide a fully-integrated Internet hosting platform that includes web, e-mail, DNS and file transfer services from a simple, user-friendly web-based interface that is easily installed on commodity hardware or virtual private server.

Omarchy is an Arch-based Linux distribution featuring the Hyprland tiling window manager. It ships with what a modern software developer would need to be productive immediately, including Neovim, Spotify, Chromium, Typora, Alacritty, LibreOffice and Zoom. The distribution boots into a text-mode system installer that downloads the latest packages from the Arch Linux repositories during installation to build a complete Hyprland desktop.

Support for Ubuntu 25.04 ‘Plucky Puffin’ officially ends on 15th January 2026 — which for those of you reading in a timely fashion is next week! A short-term support release, Ubuntu 25.04 got 9 months of updates from launch. It was released in April of 2025, making January 2026 its swan song (or puffin’s final dive, for the ornithological pedants). Once Ubuntu 25.04 reaches End of Life (EoL) it receives no more security patches, app updates or bug fixes, no matter how critical or urgent. There aren’t any real-time stats on how many people use each version of Ubuntu, but […]

You're reading Ubuntu 25.04 Support Ends Next Week (Jan 15th), a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

FEX, the open-source emulator for running x86 and x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (ARM64) Linux and that is sponsored by Valve and to be used by the Steam Frame, is out with a new monthly feature release...

MiniOS is a Debian-based Linux distribution which strives to be lightweight, modular, versatile and customisable. It comes in three editions, "Standard", "Toolbox" and "Ultra". MiniOS "Standard" is a compact system designed for everyday computing tasks, while "Toolbox" is designed for maintenance, diagnostics and recovery of computer systems; it provides a rich set of graphical and console tools for working with disks and partitions, network diagnostics and administration, data security, data and password recovery, hardware fault diagnosis and testing, as well as other utilities. Finally, the "Ultra" variant of MiniOS provides an extensive set of software tools designed both for maintenance and diagnostics of computer systems and for solving a wide range of general office tasks.

For those using a DisplayPort to HDMI dongle currently with the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver may find some higher resolutions / modes unavailable. Fortunately, a fix is on the way for dealing with this situation due to an oversight in the kernel driver...

Gaming on the go doesn't have to be boring, so check out the Decked Out Collection Humble Bundle for some interesting picks.

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While for years open-source firmware enthusiasts have been after an open-source Firmware Support Package "FSP" for Intel CPUs and back during Raja Koduri's tenure at Intel it sounded like it might happen, it has yet to happen. But at least with the forthcoming Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" there are some FSP improvements...

Over a decade after being originally released for mobile and amassing lots of happy players, EvoCreo has arrived on PC with Linux support.

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One thing currently a bit lacking on Linux is the performance of ray tracing with the open source Mesa RADV driver, but a big improvement is coming.

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Elecrow's CrowView Note 15.6 addresses complaints from the original with a larger screen, USB-C charging, and expanded SBC support. Priced at $169.

You're reading New CrowView Note 15.6 Fixes the Original Model’s Biggest Flaw, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Wipe away infections from the family computer in the nostalgic Windows XP styled Antivirus Survivors 2003 Professional later this year, with a new trailer live.

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IPFire is a Linux distribution that focuses on easy setup, good handling and high level of security. It is operated via an intuitive web-based interface which offers many configuration options for beginning and experienced system administrators. IPFire is maintained by developers who are concerned about security and who update the product regularly to keep it secure. IPFire ships with a custom package manager called Pakfire and the system can be expanded with various add-ons.

Over the past number of weeks the Dell Pro Max with GB10 has been undergoing a lot of testing at Phoronix. This NVIDIA GB10 powered mini PC with its 20 Arm cores (10 x Cortex-X925, 10 x Cortex-A725) and Blackwell GPU offers a lot of combined compute potential for AI and other workloads. In this article is a look at how the Dell Pro Max with GB10 competes with AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" within the Framework Desktop SFF PC.

Next-generation AMD server SoCs -- presumably the AMD EPYC "Venice" on Zen 6 -- is poised to introduce a firmware-agnostic platform configuration platform configuration change method/format. This is This aims to improve server platform interoperability and eliminate redundant configuration efforts for different firmware solutions...