Remote Touchpad: Control Mouse & Keyboard from Your Phone

February 22, 2020 — Leave a comment

Remote Touchpad is an open-source utility allows to remote control the mouse and keyboard connected to your computer from the web browser of a smartphone or any other device with a touchscreen.

Remote Touchpad supports Flatpak’s RemoteDesktop portal (experimental), Windows and X11.

Simply run the utility on your machine. It outputs an URL along with QR code in a terminal window. To take control open the displayed URL or scan the QR code in your phone.

The utility is available as Snap package. You can simply search for and install remote touchpad in Ubuntu Software:

It also available to install via Flatpak package, see the Flathub repository.

Once installed, launch the utility from your system application menu.

Then go to the displayer URL or scan the QR code in your phone and enjoy!

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Install Ksnip Screenshot Tool in Ubuntu via PPA Repository

February 21, 2020 — Leave a comment

This simple tutorial shows how to install the Ksnip screenshot tool in Ubuntu and receive future software updates via PPA repository.

Ksnip is a Qt-based screenshot tool runs in Windows, Mac OS, and Linux (X11, KDE, and Gnome Wayland). Similar to normal screenshot application, it supports take screenshots of whole screen, application window, and selected area. Also it has editing features, allows to upload screenshots directly to imgur.com, prints screenshot or save is to pdf/ps, and more.

The software offers official .deb for downloading in its github releases page.

If you like the screenshot tool, an unofficial PPA repository is available to receive the software package updates easily via your system update manager.

1. Open terminal by either pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard or searching for “Terminal” from application menu. When it opens, run command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dhor/myway

Type user password (no asterisk feedback due to security reason) when it prompts and hit Enter to add the PPA.

The PPA so far supports Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 19.10, and their derivatives. And the guy also maintains many other popular applications (e.g., gthumb, rawtherapee, etc.) in the PPA.

2.) Then you can install Ksnip for the first time by running commands:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install ksnip

After that, future ksnip updates will come along with your system package updates via Software Updater (Update Manager).

(Optional) To remove the PPA repository, launch Software & Updates utility and navigate to ‘Other Software’ tab, and remove the repository line.

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VirtualBox 6.1.4 Released with Linux 5.5 Guest Support

February 20, 2020 — Leave a comment

Virtualbox

Oracle Virtualbox released a new maintenance update for the 6.1 series a day ago.

The new release features Linux guest with Kernel 5.5 support, and a shared folder fix for loopback mounting of images.

Other changes in the VirtualBox 6.1.4 include:

  • Fixed a rare issue with ICEBP instruction causing guru meditations on Intel hosts.
  • Fixed macOS Catalina guests failing to boot after upgrading to 10.15.2 onwards.
  • Recent NLS integration and bug fixes for GUI and Qt translation tags
  • Fix isochronous transfers to the VM for xHCI
  • Fix buffer handling, avoiding receiving stale data when the receive queue is flushed.
  • Improve host serial port passthrough handling on Windows host
  • Restore old --clipboard option for modifyvm command
  • macOS host: Use hardened runtime and request the needed entitlements, meeting latest notarization rules which also required moving VirtualBoxVM executable
  • macOS host: Update osxfuse to v3.10.4

    • Windows host: Update Italian translation of installer

  • Windows host: Improve shared folder compatibility with POSIX append semantic
  • Windows host: Restore the ability to run VMs through Hyper-V, at the expense of performance
  • BIOS: Always report non-ATA disks as ready
  • BIOS: Report EFI support through DMI table
  • VGA BIOS: Reduce stack space usage for INT 10h handlers

How to Install Virtualbox 6.142 in Ubuntu:

For 64-bit Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 19.04, Ubuntu 19.10, and their derivatives, you can either download the official .deb binary from the link below:

Download Virtualbox for Linux

or install VBox from its official apt repository by running following steps:

1. Open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T), paste below command and run to add the repository:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian $(lsb_release -sc) contrib" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list'

For Linux Mint, you HAVE to replace $(lsb_release -sc) in the command with bionic for Mint 19.x, or xenial for Mint 18.x.

2. Then download and install the repository key via command:

wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

3. Refresh system package cache via command:

sudo apt update

4. Finally install Virtualbox 6.1:

sudo apt install virtualbox-6.1

Uninstall:

To remove it, simply run command in terminal:

sudo apt remove --autoremove virtualbox-6.1

And go to Software & Updates -> Other Software to remove apt repositories.

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How to Install Drop Down Terminal Guake 3.7 in Ubuntu 18.04

February 18, 2020 — Leave a comment

This simple tutorial shows how to install the latest drop-down terminal Guake 3.7 in Ubuntu 18.04, or Ubuntu 19.10.

Guake is an open-source drop-down terminal for Gnome desktop. While the software in Ubuntu main repository is old, the latest Guake 3.7 was released with following changes:

  • Add tab selection popover in each notebook
  • Add fullscreen hide tabbar option
  • Set custom colors for each terminal tab.
  • Add --select-terminal and --selected-terminal options to Guake CLI
  • Adds an option to display only the last directory on the current path as the tab name.
  • Reworked the tab name selection to use a drop-down menu.
  • Unfullscreen through D-Bus interface, as well as through CLI.
Guake Split Terminal Screen

Guake Split Terminal Screen

How to Install Guake in Ubuntu:

Linux Uprising team maintains a PPA repository that contains the latest packages for Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 19.10.

1.) Open terminal and run command to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linuxuprising/guake

Type user password, no asterisk feedback, when it prompts and hit Enter to continue.

2.) Then run command to install the drop-down terminal application via commands:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install guake

Once installed, launch Guake Preferences from system application menu and enjoy!

If an old version was installed previously, you may first kill Guake process or just reboot your machine to make it well working.

Uninstall:

To remove the PPA, simply go to Software & Updates -> Other Software, then remove the repository line.

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MyPaint 2.0 Released with New Layer Mode, Linear Compositing

February 17, 2020 — Leave a comment

MyPaint 2.0, free open-source raster graphics editor for digital painters, was finally released after more than a year of development.

MyPaint 2.0 is a new major release that features a new layer mode and uses linear compositing by default.

  • Linear compositing and spectral blending (pigment).
  • Full Python3 support
  • Layer views.
  • Brush strokes dependent on view rotation and view zoom.
  • Additional symmetry modes: vertical, vertical+horizontal, rotational, snowflake.
  • Expanded flood fill functionality: offset, feather, gap detection and more.
  • New brush settings: offsets, gridmap, additional smudge settings, posterize, pigment.
  • New brush inputs: barrel rotation, base radius, zoom level, gridmap x/y, direction 360, attack angle.

How to Install MyPaint 2.0 in Ubuntu:

So far, there’s only .appimage available in the Github releases page. Go to the following link, scroll down, and select download the ‘MyPaint-v2.0.0.AppImage‘ package.:

Download MyPaint [.Appimage]

Then right-click on the .appimage file, go to Properties -> Permissions, and finally make it executable by checking the box says ‘Allow executing file as program’.

Finally run the .appimage file from its context menu to launch MyPaint and enjoy!

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