UbuntuHandbook

Kodi 20.3 Released as Last Update for the “Nexus” series

Last updated: January 11, 2024 — Leave a comment

Kodi, formerly XBMC media center, released version 20.3 this Wednesday!

According to the announcements, this is the last release of the 20.x “Nexus” series. While Kodi 21 “Omega” now is in Beta 2 stage.

The release mainly includes bug-fixes and some backports. They include an assortment of fixes for Estuary, including home categories’ focus position, alignment of counter labels and Shift view for collections.

For gaming, the release fixed controllers not assigned to game ports correctly on Android, blue/pink washed out colours on Windows with 10-bit displays, and possible crash in Port dialogue box.

For Linux, it includes fixes for VP9 Profile 2 playback failure, and a leak of EGLFences in the DRM Prime renderer.
Continue Reading…

In News Kodi, XBMC media center

How to Install VSCodium IDE in Ubuntu 22.04 & 24.04 [4 Ways]

Last updated: January 10, 2024 — Leave a comment

This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to install VS-Codium IDE in Ubuntu, using 4 different ways.

VSCodium is a free and open-source software binaries of VS Code. It’s NOT a fork, but a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VS Code.

The VSCodium project was born due to:

Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking.

It’s a good choice as a telemetry-less version of VS Code without rebuilding by programmers themselves.

Codium in Ubuntu

In Howtos IDE, Visual Studio Code

Install Latest libheif 1.18.2 in Ubuntu 24.04 | 22.04

Last updated: October 17, 2024 — 4 Comments

This simple tutorial shows how to install the latest version of libheif library, for better HEIF and AVIF image formats support, in Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04 and/or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Libheif is a popular free open-source library for encoding and decoding HEIF and AVIF. Which, also has partial support for JPEG-in-HEIF, JPEG2000, uncompressed (ISO/IEC 23001-17:2023) capabilities.

It supports libde265 and/or ffmpeg for decoding HEIC images, and x265/kvazaar for encoding. For AVIF images, it uses either AOM/dav1d for decoding, and AOM/rav1e/svt-av1 for encoding support.

As well, it has command line tools to convert HEIF/HEIC to other images, and convert images to HEIF/HEIC.

Many popular applications, including GIMP, Darktable, ImageMagick, Krita, and gThumb, use libheif for HEIF and/or AVIF support. And, the library is usually installed as dependency along with them.

gThumb use libheif for AVIF support

In Howtos HEIF, photo

Chromium to Allow VA-API Hardware Decoding in Linux Wayland

Last updated: January 8, 2024 — Leave a comment

For Chromium user, the popular web browser is finally to allow VA-API hardware decoding for video playback in Linux Wayland.

Chromium so far does NOT officially support VA-API Video Acceleration API on Linux. However, there are experimental flags to enable this feature, which might work on certain configurations, but without guarantees (See the official Docs).

This experimental feature however does not work in Linux with Wayland session. Meaning the most recent Ubuntu, Fedora, & other Linux with GNOME Desktop.

Just few days ago on Saturday, Chromium source merged the request to “allowing VA-API on Linux Ozone/Wayland“, submitted by JianHui J Dai.

VaapiWrapper has been updated to remove the usage of libva-x11 and the legacy VaapiVideoDecodeAccelerator, in favor of libva-drm only. This means now Linux Ozone/Wayland can share the same code path as Linux Ozone/X11. See CL:4938496.

This CL removes the remaining libva-x11 codes from Ozone and VaapiWrapper, and allows VA-API by default on Linux Ozone/Wayland.

In News chromium browser, web

Linux 6.7 Released with Many New Hardware Support (Kernel PPA)

Last updated: January 8, 2024 — Leave a comment

Linux Kernel 6.7 is finally released! Linus Torvalds announced the release on Sunday night:

So we had a little bit more going on last week compared to the holiday week before that, but certainly not enough to make me think we’d want
to delay this any further.

End result: 6.7 is (in number of commits: over 17k non-merge commits, with 1k+ merges) one of the largest kernel releases we’ve ever had, but the extra rc8 week was purely due to timing with the holidays, not about any difficulties with the larger release.

The new Kernel release has many new and improved hardware support!

For Intel, the Turbostat command utility now supports Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake (15th gen) processors; LPSS (Low-Power Sub-System) driver now support Lunar Lake M processors; The Meteor Lake (14th gen mobile processors) graphics support now considered stable.

All the newest AMD Radeon RDNA2 and RDNA3 GPUs with Display Core Next 3.0 has Seamless Boot enabled.

And, NVIDIA has GSP support in the open-source Nouveau driver for initial GeForce RTX 40 acceleration support and improved RTX 20/30 series hardware support.

In News kernel, linux

Foliate eBook reader now Supports OPDS catalogs & JPEG-XL

Last updated: January 8, 2024 — 1 Comment

Folicate, the modern ebook reader, released version 3.1.0 with new features support.

It’s a free open-source reader written in JavaScript, and uses GTK4 plus LibAdwaita for its modern user interface, that works in most Linux Desktop and mobile devices such as PinePhone.

Folicate can open local ebook in EPUB, Mobipocket, Kindle, FB2, CBZ, and PDF file formats. It supports online digital libraries such as Feedbooks, Internet Archive, Manybook, Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, unglue.it.

In News ebook reader

Lossless Cut – Swiss Army Knife of Video Cutter added Full-Screen Support

Last updated: January 5, 2024 — Leave a comment

Lossless Cut, the popular free open-source video cutting/trimming tool, updated recently with full-screen support.

There are a few tools to cut out a fragment of a video in Linux, besides using heavy video editor application (e.g., Kdenlive and OpenShot). They include Video Trimmer, VidCutter.

However, Lossless Cut is my top favorite one! It lets you quickly extract the good parts from your videos and discard many gigabytes of data. It’s extremely fast because it does almost direct data copy instead of re-encoding with the power of FFmpeg library.

In News video cutter

How to Install SABnzbd in Ubuntu 22.04 & 24.04

Last updated: January 4, 2024 — 6 Comments

This simple tutorial shows how to install and setup SABnzbd, Usenet download tool, in Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04.

SABnzbd is a free open-source program to download binary files from Usenet servers. Many people upload all sorts of interesting material to Usenet and you need a special program to get this material with the least effort.

The app makes Usenet as simple and streamlined as possible by automating everything. All you have to do is add an .nzb. SABnzbd takes over from there, where it will be automatically downloaded, verified, repaired, extracted and filed away with zero human interaction.

In Howtos sabnzbd

How to Install Telegram Desktop in Ubuntu 24.04 | 22.04

Last updated: January 3, 2024 — Leave a comment

This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to install Telegram instant messaging app in Ubuntu 22.04 & Ubuntu 24.04.

The popular Telegram Messenger is available in most platforms. For Linux, it available as official tarball, universal Flatpak ans Snap packages. And, Ubuntu has third-party repositories to make it easy to keep updated.

So, as far as I know there are 4 ways to install the app in Ubuntu Linux. Choose any one that you prefer.

Telegram Desktop (image from flathub.org)

In Howtos messenger

Shutter works on Wayland for Select Area & Window Screenshots

Last updated: January 2, 2024 — Leave a comment

For Ubuntu 22.04/23.10, Fedora & other Linux with Wayland, Shutter screenshot tool can finally take screenshots for selected area and app windows!

Shutter is (or was) an excellent feature rich screenshot tool, with image editing and uploading support.

It was one of my top favorite apps, but removed from Ubuntu repositories due to lack of maintenance. Though, it’s later added back to system repository, thanks to open-source community’s work by porting it to GTK3.

In News screenshot tool, shutter