UbuntuHandbook

How to Rotate Images in Ubuntu 22.04

Last updated: February 12, 2024 — Leave a comment

This is a beginner’s guide shows you how to rotate your images using either a Linux command or built-in apps such as file manager and image viewer.

Option 1: Rotate an image using built-in image viewer

If you want to change the orientation for only a few photo images, then the built-in image view is always the best choice.

Simply click open your image file through the image viewer. Move mouse cursor over the app window, then you’ll see the buttons to rotate to the left and rotate to the right in bottom.

The image viewer app varies depends on your desktop environment, the rotate options may be available other-where such as in app menu.

After rotated your image, either click Save (Ctrl+S) to override the original image file, or choose Save as (Ctrl+Shift+S) to save the rotated image as another file.

In Howtos image editing, imagemagick

Wine Dev 9.2 Released with Mono Engine Updated to 9.0.0

Last updated: February 11, 2024 — Leave a comment

Wine, the popular free open-source software for running Windows apps & games on Linux, macOS, & BSD, announced a new development 9.2 release!

The new release updated Mono engine to version 9.0.0, included a number of system tray fixes, and exception handling improvements on ARM platforms.

There are as well fixes to a total of 15 bugs, including

crashes when using the Connect function in Quick3270 5.21
digikam 6.10 (& 7.1.0) crashes on start
Dolphin Emulator crashes from 5.0-17264
Elite Dangerous client gets stuck on black screen after launch
Microsoft Webview 2 installer hangs forever
Kodu game lab crashes
And more. See release note for details.

In News wine

Top New Features in GNOME 46, the Desktop for Ubuntu 24.04

Last updated: February 10, 2024 — Leave a comment

GNOME 46 reached UI, ABI/API, and feature freeze stage today. Let’s see the top new features in this popular desktop environment.

GNOME 46 will be the default desktop environment for Fedora 40 Workstation, Ubuntu 24.04, and optional in Arch, Manjaro, etc Linux.

It continues polish the desktop appearance by redesigning the improving the core app experiences.

GNOME Files, aka Nautilus, to have explicit Global Search mode, allowing to find files and folders in all search locations. And a “Search Settings” button is available to filter search results.

In Howtos Gnome

Ubuntu 24.04 Wallpaper Contest is Open! Top 8 will be Included

Last updated: February 10, 2024 — Leave a comment

Wallpaper Contest for the next Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Noble Numbat, is open! Top 8 winner images will be shipped in the iso image.

A bit different to the previous contests, this time the submissions are separated into 4 categories: Mascot Theme, Digital / Abstract Art, Nature, and Other. Each category will have 2 winners, and finally 8 mixed images will be made as optional wallpapers in Ubuntu 24.04 out-of-the-box.

The AI generated artwork is NOT allowed! Because there are active legal debates on the ownership of AI generated artwork and whether it can be copyrighted or not. And, many popular AI generation tools use a license that does not align with those for the contest.

image via meetdilip

In News ubuntu 24.04, wallpaper

Ubuntu 24.04 Aims to use Thunderbird Snap as Default

Last updated: February 8, 2024 — 1 Comment

Like Firefox, Thunderbird email client in Ubuntu is going to be replaced as a Snap app runs in sandbox.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is working on porting core apps to Snap package format in recent years. Firefox, Chromium (in system repository), and Ubuntu Software (App Center) are now Snap apps in current Ubuntu releases. Next will be probably Thunderbird!

Canonical has built Thunderbird as Snap package for a period of time. It’s a re-pack of the upstream binary, only available for amd64 (Intel/AMD CPUs), as alternative package for the pre-installed .deb package.

Just one day ago, the Ubuntu Desktop team announced that the Thunderbird Beta Snap now is building from source instead of repacking. Meaning it can be built on other CPU architecture types, such as arm64 and armhf.

And, the Thunderbird Snap built from source aims to be default in next Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

We are aiming at using the snap built from source instead of the deb in Noble. (the reasons are the same than for Firefox, making it easier to roll new versions on older supported series and reducing the maintenance efforts).

Meaning in future, there will be (mostly) NO .deb package for the Thunderbird email client in Ubuntu repository!

Thankfully, those who prefer the classic .deb to Snap can use the Mozilla Team PPA instead, which is maintained by members from Ubuntu Developer Team.

For more about the Thunderbird package format transition, see it in discourse.ubuntu.com.

In News thunderbird, ubuntu 24.04

Arduino IDE 2.3 Released, Debug Feature Goes Stable

Last updated: February 8, 2024 — 1 Comment

The Arduino team announced the 2.3 release of the Arduino IDE this Wednesday.

Since v2.3, the debug feature is now stable and fully incorporated into the IDE! It’s now based on a standard framework, and enabled for all the Arduino boards based on the Mbed™ core, include GIGA R1 WiFi, Portenta H7, Opta, Nano BLE and Nano RP2040 Connect.

Maintainers of Arduino cores can now add debugging for any board. And, the upcoming release of the Arduino-ESP32 core will support the new debug framework!

Continue Reading…

In News Arduino IDE

How to Install GO (golang 1.22) in Ubuntu 22.04

Last updated: March 9, 2024 — 3 Comments

Go programming language announced the new 1.22 release this Tuesday! Here’s the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu & other Linux.

What’s New in Go 1.22:

The variables declared by a “for” loop were created once and updated by each iteration. In new 1.22 release, each iteration of the loop creates new variables, to avoid accidental sharing bugs.
“For” loops may now range over integers.
Commands in workspaces can now use a vendor directory containing the dependencies of the workspace.
go get is no longer supported outside of a module in the legacy GOPATH mode
2% ~ 14% improvement from enabling PGO.
Requires the final point release of Go 1.20 or later for bootstrap
New math/rand/v2 package
New go/version package
See release note for more details.

In Howtos, News golang

Enable Fingerprint Reader in Ubuntu 24.04/22.04 for ThinkPad T480s

Last updated: April 28, 2024 — 7 Comments

This is a step by step guide shows how to enable fingerprint reader support for Lenovo ThinkPad T480/T480s, X1 Carbon 6th gen, X1 Yoga 3rd gen, X280, etc with 06cb:009a device in Ubuntu 22.04.

Ubuntu has fingerprint reader support out-of-the-box using libfprint, and provides option to enable fingerprint login in Users settings page. However, the library has a list of unsupported devices, including 06cb:009a that’s built-in in my used ThinkPad T480s laptop.

Thankfully, there’s a free open-source alternative python-validity that works in my case. Here’s how to install and set it up in Ubuntu 22.04, while Ubuntu 20.04 is also supported.

NOTE: This tutorial may also work in many other fingerprint readers, however, the project so far does NOT provide a page to list all supported devices.

Step 1: Tell Which Fingerprint Reader device do your laptop have

First of all, you may press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open up a terminal window.

Then run command to find out the device name of your fingerprint reader:

In Howtos fingerprint reader

How to Set Battery Charge Limit in Ubuntu 22.04 & 24.04

Last updated: February 6, 2024 — 7 Comments

This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to configure your Ubuntu laptop to limit the maximum battery charge level.

For those who keep laptop plugged in for long term, it’s better to set battery charge limit to reduce the battery wear by constantly trickle charging.

Linux Kernel supports battery charge threshold, and there’s a merge request to provide graphical UI options in Gnome Control Center. Until GNOME officially support this feature, you can follow this tutorial to do the job step by step.

In Howtos battery

New PPA to Install .NET 8 in old Ubuntu 18.04 & Ubuntu 16.04

Last updated: February 5, 2024 — 2 Comments

For .NET developers, the latest .NET 8 can be installed on old Ubuntu 18.04 and/or Ubuntu 16.04 LTS easily through PPA.

.NET 8 was released few months ago in November, 2023. It’s a new LTS release with 3 years support, and features new code generator “Dynamic Profile-Guided Optimization” (PGO), AVX-512 instruction set, out-of-the-box AI features, first preview of .NET Aspire, native AoT, and various other changes. See the release note for details.

.NET 8 is made into Ubuntu system repositories for Ubuntu 23.10 and upcoming Ubuntu 24.04. For Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, I’ve written how to install .NET 8 from Microsoft repository.

For users of Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 who can’t upgrade the system, there’s now a third-party PPA contains the .NET 8 packages for 64-bit Intel/AMD machines.

The PPA is maintained by Rob Savoury, who maintains so many PPAs with Blender, Chromium, FFmpeg, Firefox, LibreOffice, Qt5/6, Python, LLVM, Node.js, and other popular software packages with old Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 support!