UbuntuHandbook

How to Install Python 3.13 Stable in Ubuntu 24.04 / 22.04

Last updated: October 9, 2024 — 1 Comment

This simple tutorial shows how to install Python 3.13 in Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and/or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Python 3.13.0 was released on Oct 7, 2024 as the new major release that features new interactive interpreter, that supports multi-line editing, REPL-specific commands such as help, exit, clear, and quit, interactive help, history browsing, and ‘paste mode’ for pasting larger blocks of code.

CPython now has experimental support for free-threaded mode for running threads in parallel on available CPU cores, though disabled by default.

Other changes in Python 3.13.0 include:

New interactive interpreter, features multi-line editing and color support, as well as colorized exception tracebacks.
Experimental free-threaded build mode.
A preliminary, experimental JIT.
The (cyclic) garbage collector is now incremental.
Include a modified version of mimalloc, and enabled by default if supported by the platform.
Docstrings now have their leading indentation stripped, reducing memory use and the size of .pyc files.
The dbm module has a new dbm.sqlite3 backend that is used by default when creating new files.
Support for type defaults in type parameters.
New type narrowing annotation, typing.TypeIs.
New annotation for read-only items in TypeDicts.
Removals of many deprecated modules: aifc, audioop, chunk, cgi, cgitb, crypt, imghdr, mailcap, msilib, nis, nntplib, ossaudiodev, pipes, sndhdr, spwd, sunau, telnetlib, uu, xdrlib, lib2to3.

For more, see the official release note.

In Howtos programming, python

OnlyOffice Desktop Editors 8.0 Released with RTL, PDF Password Protection

Last updated: February 3, 2024 — Leave a comment

OnlyOffice, the popular free open-source office suite, announced new 8.0 release this Friday.

The release introduced one of the most awaited features, RTL support. It now supports bidirectional text in documents and presentations. But, RTL input is partially available with some limitations, since it’s still in Beta. In the settings page, user can enabled RTL interface with a checkbox, then restart the app to apply.

The new 8.0 release also added local interface themes support. Besides the built-in light, classic light, dark, and contrast dark, there’s now a “Add local theme” option to apply a custom interface using local JSON file.

In News office, OnlyOffice

How to Install Floorp Web Browser in Ubuntu (Step by Step)

Last updated: February 2, 2024 — 1 Comment

This is a step by step beginners guide shows how to install the Floorp web browser in Ubuntu Desktop.

Floorp is a new free open-source web browser forked from Firefox. It’s promoted as “the most Advanced and Fastest Firefox derivative”.

The browser is based on Firefox ESR. It’s updated every 4 weeks, with security updates provided before each Firefox release. It has strong tracking protection, no user tracking, flexible layout, and switchable design.

Floorp provides official Linux packages through an apt repository and Flatpak package. Advanced users can simply follow the commands in its download page. For beginners here’s a step by step screenshots as well as descriptions.

Floorp Web Browser

In Howtos floorp, web

LibreOffice 24.2.0 Released! New Version Numbering Scheme

Last updated: February 1, 2024 — Leave a comment

LibreOffice, the popular free open-source office suite, announced a new major release this Wednesday.

It’s LibreOffice 24.2.0, the first release introduced the new calendar-based numbering scheme (YY.M). Meaning it’s release in February, 2024.

The release added better support for Qt-based UI variants. It automatically switches to dark app color and dark icon theme for KDE Plasma when the desktop is set to dark style.

In News LibreOffice

How to Install Pale Moon with its Linux Tarball (Beginners Guide)

Last updated: February 1, 2024 — 1 Comment

This is a step by step beginners guide shows how to install Pale Moon web browser through its official Linux tarball in Ubuntu.

Pale Moon is a free open-source web browser that was started as a fork of Firefox, but now completely diverged from Firefox. It retains the highly customizable user interface, continues to support legacy add-ons and extensions, and runs in single-process mode.

The browser provides official package for Linux through a tarball, the binary package however is proprietary but NOT open-source.

This tutorial is going to show you how to install it through the tarball, though there’s an 3rd party apt repository contains the .deb package for choice.

In Howtos web

Budgie Desktop 10.9 Released! Redesigned Bluetooth, Initial Wayland Port

Last updated: January 31, 2024 — Leave a comment

Budgie desktop announced the new 10.9 release this Monday! See what’s new in the free open-source desktop environment.

Budgie is a popular desktop environment that default in Ubuntu budgie, and optional in Debian, Fedora, Arch, Manjaro Linux, etc.

The most recent version 10.9 was released few days ago. It features initial port to Wayland, which is already default in Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation, and other Linux (such as Debian 12) with recent GNOME desktop.

It adopts XFCE’s libxfce4windowing library to make the transition from X11 to Wayland. And, in the release the Show Desktop applet, Alt+Tab window switcher, and Workspace applet have been ported to the new library.

Budgie 10.9 also takes into use the budgie-session. It’s a softish fork from GNOME session 44.x.

As you may know, GNOME is going to drop X11 session. The developer, Jordan Petridis, has submit the request in project page. To retain the X11 session until switch Budgie to being Wayland-only, the budgie-session is being in use to take place.

Another change in the release is the redesigned bluetooth applet. Instead of using an older version of gnome-bluetooth, the applet now directly communicates to BlueZ and UPower over D-Bus.

And, the applet now provides direct connect/disconnect functionality for paired devices, battery life indicators, as well as functionality for sending files to Bluetooth devices.

Image from https://buddiesofbudgie.org/

How to Get Budgie Desktop 10.9

For more changes about the new desktop release, see the official release note.

To get the new desktop release, it’s better to wait your Distribution to package the updates. And, Arch Linux has already done the job.

For Ubuntu users, just keep an eye on the Ubuntu Budgie Team PPA.

In News budgie desktop

PingPath – Simple GTK4 Network Diagnostic Tool Based on Ping

Last updated: January 30, 2024 — Leave a comment

Network diagnostic is useful when you getting internet connection issue. And, here’s a brand new graphical tool for Linux beginners.

It’s PingPath, a free open-source tool written mostly in C, and use GTK4 toolkit for its user interface.

PingPath uses the popular command line tool ping to send ICMP ECHO_REQUEST to networks hosts. Simply type the host-name or IP address in header input box, hit Enter, then press Ctrl+S to get started.

It will then show you all the host IPs (if you start with host-name), as well as their autonomous system numbers and country code. For each, it shows the real time information about

numbers of pings set.
loss in percentage.
best, worst, last, and average delay in milliseconds.
as well as ping jitter (variation in delay).

Besides digital information, it also has a Graph tab to show all the info in graph lines with or without legend. This makes it easier to identify connectivity problems, measure network latency between your machine and the destination host.

The app by default sends 100 packets with 1 seconds time interval. You can change the numbers and other settings using the header-bar button menus.

How to Install PingPath in Ubuntu

The tool has an official PPA which so far supports for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 23.10, and Ubuntu 24.04.

1. First, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run command to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lrou2014/pingpath

Type user password for sudo authentication, and hit Enter to continue.

2. If you’re following this tutorial on Linux Mint, then you may either use Software Manager or manually refresh package cache by running command:

sudo apt update

3. Finally, install the network diagnostic tool by command:

sudo apt install pingpath

Once installed, search for and launch it from either start menu or Gnome overview screen depends on your desktop environment, and enjoy!

Uninstall:

To uninstall the tool, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command:

sudo apt remove --autoremove pingpath

And, remove the PPA, either by running the command below in terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:lrou2014/pingpath

Or, use the Software & Updates tool to remove the source line under Other Software tab.

In App Review network

Get Firefox VA-API Hardware Acceleration working on NVIDIA GPU

Last updated: January 31, 2024 — 10 Comments

For Ubuntu machine with NVIDIA graphics card, here’s how to implement hardware acceleration for video playback in Firefox web browser.

Firefox so far only supports VA-API for GPU decoding to offload CPU and save power. Both Intel and AMD GPUs support VA-API. However, NVIDIA so far supports the api only through the open-source Nouveau driver.

If you have only NVIDIA GPU running with proprietary driver, then hardware video acceleration does not work out-of-the-box for Firefox.

For choice, there are libvdpau-va-gl1 driver (h.264 only) or libva-vdpau-driver, but both seems no longer updated. The best choice so far is the free open-source nvidia vaapi driver.
Continue Reading…

In Howtos Firefox, Hardware Acceleration, nvidia

How to Install GNOME’s New Camera App in Ubuntu 24.04/23.10

Last updated: May 1, 2024 — 7 Comments

GNOME introduced new core camera app in the release of version 45, which however not adopted as default in Ubuntu 23.10 or Fedora 39.

If you want to try it out, then here’s how to do the trick in Ubuntu 24.04 and/or Ubuntu 23.10, and workaround “No Camera Found” issue.

The new camera app, aka Gnome Snapshot, is written in GTK4 + Libadwaita. Compare to Cheese, it looks more modern and native in current Ubuntu and Fedora Workstation.

Image from gnome.org

In Howtos camera, webcam

How to Install Latest Nginx in Ubuntu 22.04 (Step by Step)

Last updated: January 26, 2024 — Leave a comment

This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to install the latest version of Nginx web server (either mainline or stable) in Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop or Server.

Nginx is a popular free and open-source web server, that can be also used as reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache.

For a just working version, user can run command sudo apt install nginx-full to install it from Ubuntu system repository, which however is always old.

For the latest version, there are 2 ways to install the web server. Besides building from source, they include Ubuntu PPA and Nginx’s official repository.

In Howtos Nginx, web