News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
Zorin OS, the popular Ubuntu based Linux Distribution, announced v17.1 this Thursday!
Like Linux Mint, Zorin OS is based on Ubuntu LTS. The latest 17.x release series is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, but features GNOME 43 desktop with custom layout.
It provides an elegant and user friendly desktop appearance targets to users who are switching from Microsoft Windows. And, features 3 editions: Pro (cost $48), Core, and Education.
For users who prefer native .deb package, LibreOffice 24.2 is finally available to install via Ubuntu PPA!
LibreOffice is the default office suite for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and many other Linux. And, the latest so far is LibreOffice 24.2.x release series that was released a month ago.
The office suite provides official packages for Linux through Flatpak, Snap, Deb/RPM, and AppImage.
However, for Ubuntu users who prefer the native Deb package format, the LibreOffice Fresh PPA maintained by Ubuntu Team members, is a better choice.
“OTOH, it is _way_ _better_ to use packages from this PPA than using the *.deb files that The Document Foundation provides upstream, which are intentionally build against a very old baseline for maximum compatibility. So, _if_ you want to be on the bleeding edge, do it here, not with upstream *.debs.”
And now the PPA finally is updated that contains LibreOffice 24.2.1 for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 23.10, and Ubuntu 24.04. While the Ubuntu 20.04 build is stuck at the last v7.6.5.
Pithos, the free open-source client for Pandora Radio, released new 1.6.2 version a few days ago.
Pithos is a native app for Linux desktop, allowing to listen to free music through Pandora music streaming service. It’s much more lightweight than the Pandora.com web client, and well integrated with Linux desktop that features media keys, notifications, and the sound menu.
The Pithos 1.6.2 version was released a few days ago with only few bug-fixes. They include:
Nothing else!
After 3 alpha and 3 beta releases, Kodi media center 21, finally announced its first RC release this Thursday.
Kodi 21 is the next major release that’s still in development. The release features upstream FFmpeg 6.0, adds support for NFSv4, support M3U8 playlist files, AVIF images, HDR10 for Android.
The developer team asks users to try out the new development release and report issues to help to make it better. And, in the current RC1 release, changes include:
Hotkeycontroller for media keys on macOS
GNOME 46, the default desktop for Ubuntu 24.04 and Fedora 40, will finally have the option to enable Variable Refresh Rate.
Variable Refresh Rate, VRR in short, is a feature for TV, monitor, and other displays, allowing to adjust refresh rate on the fly to match the frame rate of the graphics card. Which, is useful for smoother viewing experience, and reducing screen tearing.
GNOME has the feature request for VRR support 3 years ago. It’s finally merged and planned for GNOME 46, which will be released later this month!
According to this request, it’s an experimental feature. User needs to enable it first either via Dconf Editor or gsettings tool via the command:
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['variable-refresh-rate']"
Then, log out and back in. Gnome Control Center, aka Settings, will have the option in “Displays” panel, when you click expand the “Refresh Rate”.
image from gitlab.gnome.org
Once enabled the feature, and selected your preferred value, the Refresh Rate will be displayed as “Variable (up to xxx.xx Hz)”.
This tutorial shows how to disable certain CPU cores in Ubuntu to save power and prevent your machine from overheating.
There are a few tools to manage CPU frequency and save power in Linux today. They include power-profile-daemon (Gnome built-in power mode settings), TLP laptop battery life saving tool, auto-cpufreq, and more.
Besides limiting CPU frequency, turn off few CPU cores is another choice to cool down your PC or laptop. And, Motherboard BIOS settings page usually have a corresponding option. For choice, here’s how to do the job in Ubuntu Linux.
Looking for a download manager for Ubuntu, Fedora, or other Linux with GNOME Desktop? Try Varia!
There are quite a few downloading apps for Linux Desktop. And, uGet is one of them that I prefer, which is however not updated for a few years.
For GNOME, the default desktop in Ubuntu and Fedora Workstation, there’s now a new download manager called Varia. It’s based on aria command line download utility, which is lightweight, super fast (support downloading from multi-sources in parallel), and supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, BitTorrent and Metalink.
Varia is written in Python programming language, and uses GTK4 + Libadwaita for its user interface, that’s modern and well integrated with GNOME Desktop.
Loupe is the core image viewer app for GNOME since version 45, but it’s so far not made default in Ubuntu.
It’s a fully adaptive image viewer that supports mobile form factors. It’s touch-friendly that supports 2-finger swipe left/right to navigate, 2-finger pinch/stretch to zoom out/in, and 2-finger gestures to rotate images.
Other features of Loupe include fast GPU accelerated image rendering, tiled rendering for vector graphics, sandboxed image decoding, and more.
This tutorial shows how to use locate command to quickly find files in your Linux system.
In Ubuntu Linux, the locate command is provided by the plocate package. It’s very fast command line search tool, that can find all files in the system matching the given pattern. It rarely needs to scan through its entire database, and most I/O is done asynchronously, but the results are synchronized.
Most importantly plocate is easy to use! I regularly use it to search app icon images that are in use in most pages of this website.
Ubuntu has a few offline games out-of-the-box. Now, the developer team is going to remove them from the installer in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
Since Ubuntu 23.10, Ubuntu Desktop no longer provides ‘Minimal installation‘ option in the installer. Instead, it’s “re-named” to “Default installation” with just the essentials, web browser and basic utilities. User can choose “Full installation” option for the office, media player, games, and other app packages that’s previously installed by default in old Ubuntu releases.
Just a few days ago, the desktop team proposed to remove the games from full installation, then made the decision with wider support.
Meaning that the game packages may be completely removed from the iso image, though they are still available to install in Ubuntu Software (App Center).
