Jul 172013
 

This is an interesting article by Paolo Rotolo, it’s a comparison of MIR (in the Xmir version that will be present on Ubuntu 13.10) and the current Xorg.

After the announcement of Canonical on Mir, which will be included as a default display server in Ubuntu 13.10, I decided to do some tests (benchmark, in the jargon), to see whether the performances of Mir are comparable to those of the good old X.org (the daemons currently present on Ubuntu), as promised by Mark Shuttleworth on his blog.

All benchmarks were performed with the suite “Phoronix Test” on Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander).

I’ve done all the test run on an hardware with low-medium specs (especially the video card), because with a more powerful PC, the differences between X.org and Mir would have been less relevant.

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May 122013
 

xubuntu-ringtail-bottom-panel

Last year I’ve bought a new desktop computer and on this one I’ve moved from Ubuntu to Mint as “Home distribution”, but I still have as backup PC an old laptop with Ubuntu, and some days ago I’ve updated it from Xubuntu 12.10 to 13.04, these are my observations about this new release of Ubuntu.

First: I’ve heard that Unity has improved in this release, but I really don’t like this Desktop Environment and so I’ll only talk about Xubuntu, so Ubuntu 13.04 with XFCE, one of my favorite DE for GNU/Linux along Fluxbox, Openbox and Cinnamon (in this order).

So let’s see how to upgrade and what’s new in this release of Xubuntu.
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Apr 022013
 

More and more games are published for Linux and so it’s becoming more important to have a good performance with our beloved system, but some of the Desktop Environemnts can really slow down your gaming experience.

There is an interesting report about this on Phoronix in the article: Gaming/Graphics Performance On Unity, GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and these are their conclusions:

Overall the results were interesting from the range of Linux OpenGL benchmarks conducted under Unity, Unity 2D, GNOME Shell, GNOME Classic, KDE Plasma, and Xfce on Ubuntu 12.04. There are some exceptions, but across the driver configurations the desktops to commonly perform the best were Xfce 4.8 and GNOME Shell 3.2.2.1. The default Unity desktop was a mix in terms of performance across the different OpenGL workloads.

So there are good chance that you can speed up your graphics performance, how ?
Use Fsgamer
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1 week with Mint Nadia XFCE

1 week with Mint Nadia XFCE

On the 21 of December Linux Mint 14 Xfce has been released, codename Nadia. This release of Mint is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and shipped with the XFCE desktop environemnt as my readers probably know I’ve installed Mint 13 XFCE on my new desktop and so I’ve decided to upgrade my installation to this new […]

Get information on your hardware with hardinfo

Get information on your hardware with hardinfo

On a former article I’ve presented 3 command line commands that you can use to get information on your Linux box: lsusb, lspci and lshw, they are really good and I use the first 2 in a lot of situation where I want to check if all my devices works correctly. Today I’ll propose to […]