News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
Firefox web browser 136.0 is out today with many new features!
The new release introduced a new setting option, allowing to add sidebar toggle button in top-left, to quickly show/hide the side-bar. Where, you can quickly access the AI chatbox, history, tabs from other devices, and settings.
This tutorial shows how to block ads, trackers, and malware domains system-wide in Ubuntu and other Linux desktop using hBlock.
hBlock is a free open-source script that collects a large list of domains that serve ads, tracking scripts and malware from multiple sources. It blocks them by mapping all those domain names to 0.0.0.0 using hosts file, thus it works system-wide.
For GnuCash users who prefer the native .deb package format, here I made a new unofficial PPA for all current Ubuntu releases.
GnuCash is a popular personal and small-business financial-accounting software. It’s available in the Ubuntu system repositories, but always old.
I’ve written about how to install the most recent GnuCash 5.12 in Ubuntu in different ways. For those who prefer the .deb package, here’s a new PPA available for choice.
Fish shell, the popular free open-source command line shell, release new major 4.0 version yesterday.
Shell is a program that interprets and executes the commands you type in the terminal. Linux has different type shells, e.g., Bourne Shell (sh), GNU Bourne-Again Shell (bash), and C Shell (csh). And, current Ubuntu releases default to bash shell.
NVIDIA announced the new 570.124.04 stable driver yesterday as the latest production branch version for Linux users.
Compare to the last 570.86.16 Beta driver, this release added new conceal_vrr_caps parameter to the nvidia-modeset kernel module. Which, allows to enable features on displays (such as ULMB) that are incompatible with variable refresh rate (VRR).
Just a week since the last release, KDE announced the second maintenance update for the Plasma 6.3 Desktop.
Plasma 6.3.2 added support for fractional scaling with denominator of 120. According to this page, the appropriate denominator for the scale is 120. However, Display Configuration previously only allowed 5% increments. In the new release, it supports setting a scale of e.g., 174.167% (209/120).
Emacs text editor released new major 30.1 version a few days ago. For Ubuntu users who prefer the classic .deb package, here’s unofficial PPA updated for all current Ubuntu releases.
Emacs 30.1 features Android port, improved touchscreen support, new trusted-content option, native JSON support, default app for ‘org-protocol’, ability to set toolbar to bottom, new packages, and more. See the NEWS page for details.
This tutorial shows how to enable touchpad 4-finger swipe and pinch gestures in Ubuntu 24.04, 24.10 and 25.04 with default GNOME Desktop on Wayland.
GNOME since version 40 supports 3-finger swipe gestures to switch between workspaces and trigger overview screen. And, there’s an extension Gesture Improvements to enhance the features with 4-finger and pinch gestures support. However, the extension only supports Gnome from version 40 to 44.
If you want to extend the gestures on recent GNOME 45 ~ 48 (meaning Ubuntu 24.04+, Fedora Workstation 40+, etc), there’s now an open-source fork to do the job on Wayland.
Apache NetBeans announced new 25 release a few days ago. Here are the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu.
NetBeans 25 was released after 2 release candidates. It updated the user interface with another batch of SVG icons for better HiDPI display support, and switched SVG loading routine in ImageUtilities from the Batik library to the much more lightweight JSVG library.
Just few weeks after the last release, HandBrake video transcoding released new 1.9.2 version with few more fixes.
In new HandBrake 1.9.2, it now allows muxing NVENC AV1 and VCN AV1 in WebM container. It also fixed a crash that could happen when a source contains chapters with no titles.
