The Linux Ninja

I got pretty busy this past week and missed quite a few big linux stories that I wanted to post about so I decided to do this post to as a mini-roundup with short summaries for each post. Sorry for the lapse in posting, I’ll try to get back to more regular posts next week.

• GCC 4.4.0 Released – GCC 4.4 incorporates the Graphite branch which is a new framework for loop optimizations, better support for the C++0X standard, and a new register allocator. Full changes can be read here.
• Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” Released – The next Ubuntu release in the LTS cycle hit its target release date on April 23. There are tons of changes that range from performance improvements to package updates. Boot time has been significantly improved, GNOME 2.26, X.org 1.6, ext4 support, Wacom tablet hotplugging support, Linux kernel 2.6.28, and many more. The Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mythbuntu, etc. Ubuntu-based distributions also saw releases with the same upgrades in addition to their specific desktop environment upgrades.
• Firefox 3.5b4 Benchmarks – The TuxRadar guys posted some very interesting benchmarks for Firefox 3.5b4. There are significant JavaScript performance improvements that appear to be coming in the next version.
• Ubuntu 9.04: 32-bit vs. 64-bit Benchmarks Another interesting benchmark article from the guys at TuxRadar. They benchmark the default 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu distros for boot time, archive decompression, kernel compilation time, ogg encoding, Adobe Flash, Google V8 JavaScript Benchmark for Firefox, and Blender rendering. From their results they show that the 64-bit version does indeed come away ahead in performance as expected.