While it may not be as exciting as looking at these new end-user features, in this article we are testing out the available kernels for Ubuntu 10.04. Besides the standard Linux 2.6.32 kernel used in the Lucid release, there is also a specialized server kernel as well as a new -preempt kernel is now available.

After those Linux file-system benchmarks were published, we received a request from Canonical to look at the EXT3 performance too. With that said, we have done just that and have published EXT3, EXT4, and Btrfs benchmarks from Ubuntu 9.10 and a Ubuntu 10.04 development snapshot from an Intel Atom netbook.

On the surface, trying to write a comparative review of Linux Mint 8 (Helena) and Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic koala) would seem like a pointless exercise. After all, Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu.

With Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 having made it out yesterday, we couldn’t resist but to run some new benchmarks of the Lucid Lynx after our original tests last month found Ubuntu 10.04 was off to a poor performance start.

I have been curious to see exactly how drastic the performance difference of the engine is between the Windows and Linux platforms. Since I recently installed Windows 7 I decided to sit down and put the software through its paces.

Coming up in our forums was a testing request to compare the performance of Linux between using 32-bit, 32-bit PAE, and 64-bit kernels. This is coming after Linus Torvalds has spoke of 25% performance differences between kernels using CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G and those without this option that allows 32-bit builds to address up to 4GB of physical [...]

With all of the netbook-focused distribution updates, we found it time to run an onslaught of new benchmarks, comparing some of the leaders in this field along with running a couple full-blown desktop distributions for this round of Linux netbook benchmarking.

Here are our benchmarks, including the world’s first look at the Chromium OS (Chrome OS) system performance from the latest development build. Covered is everything from the video playback performance to encoding to battery power consumption and CPU/memory usage tests.

As we await the release of FreeBSD 8.0 to deliver a larger operating system comparison, we have carried out a fresh round of tests comparing Mac OS X 10.6.2 and Ubuntu 9.10 (both x86 and x86_64 editions) under a variety of tests.

Windows 7 turns to face its latest challenger in the form of Ubuntu 9.10, the latest and greatest flavour of Linux to be released.

I love Windows 7 but I can’t give up by favorite Linux OSeither. So, I finally decided to do a Performance Benchmark Showdown to decide who gets to rule on my PC. Probably, everyone knows what’s new in both of them.

With the release of CentOS 5.4 last month to bring this community enterprise operating system on par with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
.4, we decided it was a good time to see how the server / workstation performance between this new CentOS release compares to that of Ubuntu 9.10

For the testing in this article we pulled out an aging laptop and ran a set of tests across Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 8.10, Ubuntu 9.04, and the latest Ubuntu 9.10 snapshot.

Canonical will be releasing Ubuntu 9.10 at the end of next month while the final release of FreeBSD 8.0 is also expected within the next few weeks. With these two popular free software operating systems both having major updates coming out at around the same time, we decided it warranted some early benchmarking

The latest Ubuntu 9.10 alpha release includes significant improvements to boot performance. Tests show that the popular Linux distribution can now boot in mere seconds on a computer with a solid state drive.

The latest Ubuntu 9.10 alpha release includes significant improvements to boot performance. Tests show that the popular Linux distribution can now boot in mere seconds on a computer with a solid state drive

Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4 was released last week and with all of its updated packages and changes compared to Ubuntu 9.04, we decided to carry out a fresh round of benchmarks comparing Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4.

This new development release of Ubuntu carries the latest kernel, Mesa, and Intel driver packages as we see how the graphics performance is with an Intel 945 and G43 chipsets.

In this article we have results comparing OpenSolaris 2009.06 and Ubuntu 9.04 on the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook.

Fedora 11 was released earlier this week so we have set out to see how its desktop performance compares to that of Ubuntu 9.04, which was released back in April.

We have already looked at the performance of Ubuntu’s Jaunty Jackalope, and even found it to perform with old hardware, but how does it now compete with Mac OS X? We have more benchmarks this morning to continue this performance investigation.

We had not looked closely at running the Jaunty Jackalope with older hardware. In this article though we have done just that and carried out a number of Ubuntu 9.04 tests using an older VIA-based PC.

Due to the performance regressions and other bugs present in the Intel driver stack found in Ubuntu 9.04, it ended up killing the netbook experience with many of these Atom-powered netbooks using Intel 945 graphics (though the problem at hand impacts all Intel IGPs).

I know that Ubuntu and Zenwalk should not be compared because there are a lot of differences between them. Ubuntu uses gnome and Zenwalk xfce. Xfce is more lightweight than gnome and Zenwalk tries to be a lightweight distribution.

Yes, it’s Ubuntu release week and yes, we’ll be looking at Ubuntu for our feature article. Instead of a review of what everyone already knows, this week I thought we’d take a look at how the newly released Xubuntu 9.04 compares to Debian Lenny with an Xfce desktop.

I decided it would be a worthwhile project to compare boot times for Ubuntu 9.04, OS X 10.5.6, Windows Vista, and Windows XP. I also wanted to see how fast Firefox would launch on each system.

After reading about the blazing fast boot time of Ubuntu 9.04 on Matt Cutts’ blog, I decided it was worthwhile to go for the upgrade on my MSI Wind U100-432US. Before the upgrade I made sure to install bootchart and manually measure the boot time as well.

GeunSik Lim, a Samsung software developer specialising in embedded Linux system design, has compared the netbook boot times for several Linux-based operating systems to see which was fastest.

Most Linux users run a 32-bit distro, and many of them run a 32-bit distro on a 64-bit computer. The question is, why? We put 32-bit Ubuntu 9.04 head-to-head with its 64-bit counterpart to see what difference it really makes, and whether old compatibility worries are justified.

We are looking at the performance of Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu 8.10, and Ubuntu 9.04 from the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook. Since Ubuntu 8.04.2, Intel’s Atom performance has improved tremendously and Dell should begin thinking about upgrading past the Long-Term Support release.