UbuntuHandbook

Install Nvidia Driver 346.59 in Ubuntu from PPA

Last updated: April 8, 2015

A new Linux graphics driver NVDIA 346.59 was released with all GeForce 900 series notebook GPUs support, e.g., GeForce 920M, 930A, 930M, 940M, GTX 950M, GTX 960M. Also GTX TITAN X, Quadro K1200, M6000 GPUs are added support in this release.

Besides that, following bugs has been fixed in NIVDIA 346.59:

Fixed a bug that caused corruption when switching display modes in some applications that use transform feedback.
Fixed a bug that caused texture corruption on framebuffer depth attachments cleared using glClearTexImage().
Fixed a bug that artificially limited the maximum pixel clock on displays in some SLI Mosaic configurations.
Fixed a kernel memory leak that occurred when looping hardware- accelerated video decoding with VDPAU on Maxell-based GPUs.
Fixed a bug that could cause nvidia-settings to crash on exit on 32-bit Linux systems.

Install NVIDIA 346.59 from PPA:

The new release has been made into PPA repository, available for Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 15.04.

To install it, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run below commands one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mamarley/nvidia

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install nvidia-346

For Ubuntu 14.04 and other Linux, you may download the official binary from nvidia page, and follow this how-to-install guide.

In Howtos Nvidia Driver

Nitrux Icon Theme 3.5 Brings Several New Software Icons

Last updated: April 6, 2015

Nitrux is a simple, clean and hand crafted icon set for GTK based environments (Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, XFCE, LXDE), KDE (Plasma, Plasma 5) and Android.

This icon theme just got a new release a few hours ago which fixed misnamed Bygfoot icon, added back Synaptic package status icons, made icon for Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Nitrux 3.5.0 also adds some new icons for:

fault milestone one
Fading Hearts
Narcissu 1st & 2nd
Sakura Spirit
Serious Sam 3:BFE
garry’s mod
Team Fortress 2
Half-Life Blue Shift
Counter Strike-Condition-Zero
Ricochet
Opposing Force
Team Fortress
and several action icons for Plasma.

Install Nitrux Icon Theme:

First grab the latest .DEB binary (nitrux-icon-theme_x.x.x_all.deb) from link below:

Download Nitrux Icon DEB

For KDE user, download the below version instead:

Download Nitrux Icon for KDE

Then click open the .deb with Ubuntu Software Center and install the theme.

To apply the theme, you may use Unity Tweak Tool, Gnome Tweak Tool, Ubuntu Tweak, etc.

In News icons

Install Audacity Audio Editor 2.1.0 in Ubuntu From PPA

Last updated: April 4, 2016

A new stable release of the free and open-source Audio Editor and Recorder, Audacity 2.1.0, was announced a few days ago.

The new release brings Real-Time Preview feature and lots of improvements and bug fixes. Here’s the release highlights:

For a long time, we have wanted Real-Time Preview for effects. It seemed nearly unachievable without major restructuring. But with Audacity 2.1.0, we have it in LADSPA, VST, and Audio Unit (OS X) effects! Thanks to Leland Lucius for these great new capabilities!
Much improved Noise Reduction effect replaces Noise Removal. Thanks to new contributor Paul Licameli!
Lots of other improvements to effects, also thanks to Leland, including:
- VST: FXB preset banks, hosting multiple plugins
- All effects can now be used in Chains, and can be sorted on name, publisher, or class.
- Most Nyquist effects now have Preview button.
Redesigned Meter Toolbars show a lot more information in smaller area. Thanks, Leland Lucius and James Crook!
Spectral Selection in Spectrogram view. Thanks to Paul Licameli!

For more details, see the release note.

Install / Upgrade to Audacity 2.1.0 in Ubuntu / Linux Mint:

Since Audacity Team only provides an daily build PPA with latest development packages and Ubuntu repositories still provide old versions in Software Center, I’ve uploaded Audacity 2.1.0 into this PPA.

So far, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Linux Mint 13 and 17 are supported.

Update: PPA updated with the 2.1.1 packages for 15.10, 15.04, and 14.04! Ubuntu 12.04 is excluded due to the old libsuil library.

1. To add the PPA, open terminal from the Dash, Menu, or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/audacity

2. After adding the PPA, you can upgrade the editor using Software Updater (or Updater Manager).

Or just run below commands one by one in terminal:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install audacity

For issue and help, please use Audacity Forum.

In Howtos audacity, Audacity PPA

How to Play An Ambient Noise in Ubuntu 14.04

Last updated: April 4, 2015

ANoise Player is a handy application allows to play some background noises in Ubuntu by simply choosing a noise (e.g., rain, night, wind, sea, storm, fire, forest, and coffee shop) from system tray sound menu. More noises can be added to menu manually.

The player is an open-source project created by Marcos Alvarez Costales, an Ubuntu Member and the developer of Folder Color extension.

If you want to try it in your Ubuntu, run below commands one by one in terminal to get it from PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:costales/anoise

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install anoise anoise-community-extension1

So far, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10, and Ubuntu 15.04 are supported. Note: For GNOME Shell you’ll need this extension.

If you don’t want to add the PPA, grab the .deb packages of anoise and anoise-media from PPA packages page. And I will recommend to install them via below command because they depend on each other.

cd ~/Downloads; sudo dpkg -i anoise*.deb; sudo apt-get -f install

Once installed, start the player for the first time from the Unity Dash and then you can always play a ambient noise the sound indicator.

To add your own .OGG noises to sound indicator, copy and paste the files into Computer > usr > share > anoise > sounds folder. You may run gksudo nautilus command to open file browser with root and do the copy and paste things.

In Howtos Ambient Noise

Blender 2.74 Released with Lots of Improvements

Last updated: April 2, 2015

A new stable release of the open-source 3D software Blender 2.74 was released at the end of March with some new features and numerous improvements.

Blender 2.74 release highlights:

Cycles got several precision, noise, speed, memory improvements, new Pointiness attribute.
Viewport has new cool compositing features, outliner now manages orphan datablocks better.
Modeling now allows custom normals, and transferring data layers between meshes!
Massive improvements to hair dynamics and editing tools: a big step forward with more to come…
A new tool “Cavity Mask” was added to sculpting/painting, along with other improvements.
Great memory consumption optimization in Freestyle NPR stroke rendering.
Grease pencil and Game engine improvements, and more…

Read the detailed changes at this page.

How to Install or Upgrade to Blender 2.74 in Ubuntu:

While Blender website provides a portable version for download, you can always install the latest release via these steps in another post (You may first remove the previous Blender installation).

There are some guys maintaining the most recent Blender release in PPAs. Below are some of them:

Thomas Schiex’s PPA: https://launchpad.net/~thomas-schiex/+archive/ubuntu/blender
hjmooses’s PPA: https://launchpad.net/~heyarje/+archive/ubuntu/blender-2.7

To add a PPA, run below command in terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository PPA_NAME_HERE

For example, running sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thomas-schiex/blender to add the Thomas Schiex’s PPA.

After adding a PPA, open Software Updater and upgrade Blender after checking for updates.

In Howtos blender

How to Fix Screen Brightness Issue in Ubuntu Laptop

Last updated: April 1, 2015

Running Ubuntu on a laptop? You may found that Ubuntu doesn’t memorize your screen brightness level. Every time you reboot or wake the machine up from sleep, it resets the screen brightness to maximum level.

I’ve written how to save screen brightness level in Ubuntu, but it might not work for all video adapters.

Thanks to Norbert, he made a sysvinit-backlight script that automatically remembers your screen brightness level for all video adapters and loads the backlight levels on boot, reboot, or wake up from sleep.

To install the script:

Open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run below commands one by one to get it from Norbert’s PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nrbrtx/sysvinit-backlight

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install sysvinit-backlight

If you don’t want to add PPA, you may grab the script directly from PPA packages page. So far, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 12.04 are supported.

For more you may contact the the script author at launchpad.net.

In Howtos screen brightness

Firefox 37 Released with User Rating System [How-to-Upgrade]

Last updated: March 31, 2015

A new stable release of Mozilla’s web browser, Firefox 37, was released today at the end of March.

According to the release note, Firefox 37 brings a heartbeat user rating system to get user feedback about Firefox. Every day a random subset of users are offered a rating widget. After rating Firefox, an ENGAGEMENT page may open in a background tab.

Users can disable this feature by going to about:config, search browser.selfsupport.url in filter box and set value to “”.

Besides that, Firefox 37 comes with below changes:

Yandex set as default search provider for the Turkish locale
Bing search now uses HTTPS for secure searching
Improved protection against site impersonation via OneCRL centralized certificate revocation
Opportunistically encrypt HTTP traffic where the server supports HTTP/2 AltSvc
Disabled insecure TLS version fallback for site security
Extended SSL error reporting for reporting non-certificate errors
TLS False Start optimization now requires a cipher suite using AEAD construction
Improved certificate and TLS communication security by removing support for DSA
Improved performance of WebGL rendering on Windows
Implemented a subset of the Media Source Extensions (MSE) API to allow native HTML5 playback on YouTube (Windows only)
Added support for CSS display:contents
IndexedDB now accessible from worker threads
New SDP/JSEP implementation in WebRT

See the release note for details.

How to upgrade Firefox in Ubuntu:

For Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 14.10, Firefox 37 will be available for upgrade very soon through Ubuntu official repositories.

Once the official build of Firefox 37 is available, you can open Software Updater and install available updates after checking for updates.

In News Firefox

Rhythmbox Music Player 3.2 Released [How-to-upgrade]

Last updated: March 29, 2015

The 3.2 release of Rhythmbox, Ubuntu’s default music player, was announced just a few hours ago with some new features, bug fixes and translation updates.

According the the changelog, Rhythmbox 3.2 brings a Soundcloud plugin, support for disc and track total tags, ability to clear, re-fetch and manually set cover art using the song info window.

There are also some bugs has been fixed in the new release:

same songs played after reading a playlist
no easy way to unselect the browse by album,artist,genre option
Unclear string “in” for translation
rhythmbox skips one or two songs after playing certain songs
configure warning: ‘INCLUDES’ is the old name for ‘AM_CPPFLAGS’ (or ‘*_CPPFLAGS’)
Add track count and disc count to the database
data: Add Vorbis aliases as supported mime-types
Failure to build with tdb 1.3
Crash when right clicking the track list in the library
Rhythmbox fails to import MP3 files with ID3 v2.4 tags created by PicardQT
Tracks with no embedded covert art show a random cover art from the music collection
Right click on any file in ‘Tracks list’ clashes the application
Duplicate symbol _rb_metadata_iface_xml
gdkx.h explicitly included; prevents building on Mac
symbolic icon is broken

How to upgrade to Rhythmbox 3.2 in Ubuntu:

The new release is available in fossfreedom’s PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 15.04, and Linux Mint 17.

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

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:fossfreedom/rhythmbox

2. After adding the PPA, launch Software Updater (or Update Manager) and install available updates for Rhythmbox after checking for updates.

In Howtos, News rhythmbox

Install Free Music Score App ‘MuseScore’ 2.0 in Ubuntu 14.04

Last updated: March 28, 2015

MuseScore, a free and open-source music composition and notation software, has reached a new major release, MuseScore 2.0, with great new features and improvements.

MuseScore is a scorewriter for Windows, OS X, and Linux. It’s main purpose is the creation, editing and printing of various types of musical scores in a “What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get” (WYSIWYG) environment.

MuseScore 2.0 comes with a brand new start center to simplify score browsing and creation, an inspector window to provide easy access to properties of individual notes and other elements, and customizable palettes to allow you to group your most commonly-used score symbols together.

MuseScore 2 also brings:

a new continuous view mode
some powerful new editing tools.
New notation styles and elements
layout, playback, import and export improvements.

For more, see what’s new in MuseScore 2.

How to install/upgrade MuseScore 2.0 in Ubuntu:

The new release has been made into its official PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 15.04.

To install it, open terminal from the Dash/Menu or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run below commands one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:mscore-ubuntu/mscore-stable

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install musescore

In Howtos free music score, MuseScore

Ubuntu 15.04 Final Beta Available for Download

Last updated: September 29, 2017

The beta 2 release of Ubuntu 15.04 Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products was announced today, codenamed “Vivid Vervet”.

Ubuntu 15.04 comes with Linux Kernel 3.19. The default desktop Unity 7.3 brings many bug-fixes and locally integrated menus for unfocused windows. This release also ships Compiz Window Manager 0.9.12 with Nvidia fixes, fully MATE desktop support.

Before Ubuntu 15.04 final to be released on April 23, there will be also a RC release on April 16.

Download Ubuntu 15.04:

This beta release includes images from not only the Ubuntu Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products, but also the Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu Studio, Xubuntu, and a new official flavor Ubuntu MATE.

Here are the download links for:

Ubuntu Desktop, Server, Cloud, Core: releases.ubuntu.com/vivid/

KUbuntu 15.04: cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/vivid/

LUbuntu 15.04: cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/vivid/

Ubuntu Gnome 15.04: cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-gnome/releases/vivid/

UbuntuKylin 15.04: cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/vivid/

UbuntuStudio 15.04: cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/vivid/

Xubuntu 15.04: cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/vivid/

Ubuntu MATE 15.04: cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/vivid/

Ubuntu 15.04 Beta2 official release note is here.

In News ubuntu 15.04