Quick tutorial that shows beginners how to remove the shortcut icons from Xfce4 Desktop in (X)Ubuntu 14.10, (X)Ubuntu 14.04.
Xfce4 shows Home, Devices, Trash icons on desktop out-of-the-box. You can’t simply remove them from the right-click context menu. But it’s easy to hide or disable them via the Desktop Settings utility.
1. Open Desktop Settings from the Application Menu. Or right-click on desktop and select it from the pop-up context menu.
2. When the utility opens, navigate to Icons tab. Un-check all the boxes under Desktop Icons.
Note that you might need to re-size the window so that you can see the checkboxes.
This should remove user’s Home, Trash, and Devices icons.
If you want to hide all desktop icons besides removing application shortcuts from ~/Desktops folder, just set Icon Type to None. Note that this also changes the desktop right-click menu.
Yarock, a Qt4 Modern Music Player, has just reached 1.0 release, which brings new clean and elegant design, adds artists images, album cover support, and fixes a few bugs.
Yarock is a music player in c++/Qt designed to provide a clean, simple and beautiful music collection based on album cover art. It features:
Music collection database (SQLite 3)
Browse your local music collection based on cover art
Easy search and filter music collection
Manage favorites item (album, artist)
Play music directly from collection or playqueue
Simple Playqueue
Smart playlist generator
Support mp3,Ogg Vorbis,flac music files (depending on phonon backend)
Support load/save playlist file (m3u, pls, xspf)
Play radio stream (tunin, shoutcast, dirble, …)
Mp3Gain tag support for volume normalization
Cover art download
Last Fm scrobbler
Command line interface, Mpris interface
Clean and simple user interface
No GNOME or KDE dependancies
The 1.0 release was announced a few hours ago with below changes:
new clean and elegant design, new icon set, new app icon
add support for artists images (new view, download artists images)
save rating to file
add advanced library search
add album cover for playqueue widget
add stars rating for playqueue widget
add multiple tracks edition
rewrite now playing widget
improve browser view multiple selection with SHIFT key
improve artist/album/track tags edition
support more scalable ui items
file dialog various improvements
improve file system view performance
fix “open with” yarock from KDE menu
fix playqueue restoration at startup
fix translation installation path
fix rating mp3 tag reading
minor fix for genre sorting view
How to Install Yarock 1.0 in Ubuntu:
For Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 and Linux Mint 17 Qiana, Yarock 1.0 is available in a launchpad PPA repository.
Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run the commands below one by one:
For those who don’t want to add the PPA, grab the installer directly from the Launchpad Page. Depends on your OS type, select download & install i386 (32-bit) or amd64 (64-bit) deb.
The latest long lived branch release Nvidia 340.58 was released this Wednesday with below changes:
Added support for the following GPUs:
GeForce GT820M
GeForce GTX 760A
GeForce GTX 850A
GeForce 810A
GeForce 820A
GeForce 840A
Fixed a bug that could cause VT-switching to fail following a suspend, resume, and driver reload sequence.
Fixed a bug that caused incorrect colors to be displayed on X screens running at depth 8 on some GPUs.
Fixed a bug that prevented GPUs from being correctly recognized in MetaMode strings when identified by UUID.
Implemented support for disabling indirect GLX context creation using the -iglx option available on X.Org server release 1.16 and newer. Note that future X.Org server releases may make the -iglx option the default. To re-enable support for indirect GLX on such servers, use the +iglx option.
Added the “AllowIndirectGLXProtocol” X config option. This option can be used to disallow use of GLX protocol. See “Appendix B. X Config Options” in the README for more details.
How to Install / Upgrade to Nvidia 340.58:
The Xorg-Edgers PPA provides the binary packages of the driver for Ubuntu 14.10, and Ubuntu 14.04.
Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run the commands below one by one:
Above commands will add the PPA and install the new driver. After that, restart your computer to take effect.
If for some reason, the new driver does not work properly. Open terminal or log into command console (Ctrl+Alt+F2), run below commands to install ppa-purge and purge the PPA:
Tomahawk social media player has recently released version 0.8, which features redesigned UI, Beats and Google Play Music support and more.
Tomahawk is a music player that not only plays your local collection, but also streams from SoundCloud, Beats, Spotify, Google Play Music, YouTube and many more. You can even connect Tomahawk with your friends via Jabber / GTalk and share your playlists and collections.
What’s new in Tomahawk 0.8:
Redesigned – Shiny new interface. Simplified. New icons.
Added Friend Feed.
Now Playing notifications (OS X & Windows) – support for OS-level notification systems (e.g. Notification Center) with fallback to its own native notification system.
Many actions now available in context menu – including Favorite and Send to a Friend.
Drag and drop support for iTunes, Deezer, Beats Music, Rdio, Spotify, SoundCloud links (into Tomahawk) for playlists/tracks/artists/album links.
Support for clicking source icon for currently playing track in audio controls to take user to associated page on source’s site
Added Hatchet plug-in.
Added Google Play Music and Beats Music support.
Add links to Support site, Bug Reports and Translations to Help menu.
Add “What’s New” page to display on first launch (or until user dismisses it) – also available from Help menu.
Changed label from “Resolvers” and “Services” to more generic “Plug-Ins”.
Clarified some labels, help text and status messages.
Changed icon color a bit.
Added “Acoustic” and “Electric” songtypes to Stations options.
Removed some stale Chart sources.
Playback Queue now saves its state across sessions.
Queue now moved to sidebar
Added “Inbox” feature, showing incoming song recommendations. Dropping a track on a user in the sidebar sends a recommendation to them.
You will now be asked whether you want to trust invalid SSL certificates.
Improved connecting between Tomahawk peers and support having multiple IPs (including IPv6).
Removed Top Loved from sidebar.
Removed Spotify playlist syncing (will be back in future versions).
HTTP(S) streaming is now done by Tomahawk instead of the Phonon backend (fixed HTTPS streaming on MacOS).
Heavily reduced memory footprint during and after indexing the database.
Retina display and DPI scaling fixes.
New Collection views. Re-added support for tracklist view of Collection.
Added Telepathy support.
Plugin refactoring (and .AXE resolver binaries).
Removed Twitter due to change in Twitter’s API.
Removed auto-playlists.
Improved error messages.
Added basic remote control API.
Add support for Opus codec (requires TagLib 1.9).
Support rtmp:// streams.
Support custom headers in CustomUrlHandler.
Fuzzy search indices for JS Resolvers.
Add metadata retrieval of HTTP(S) streams in JavaScript resolvers.
How to Install Tomahawk in Ubuntu:
While Ubuntu repositories provide an old version of Tomahawk, you can always install the latest release from its official PPA. So far, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10, and Linux Mint 17 are supported.
To get started, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run the command below to add the PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tomahawk/ppa
Then install Tomahawk 0.8 via Synaptic Package Manager or commands below:
Open Source racing game Stunt Rally got a new release with new tracks, sceneries, and other features. Here is how to install it in Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10.
Stunt Rally is an open source racing game with a track editor. It focuses on closed rally tracks with possible stunt elements (jumps, loops, pipes).
The 2.5 release was announced the day before yesterday, and below is the changelog:
167 tracks (20 New)
5 New sceneries: Surreal, Stone, Space, Alien, BlackDesert
Common
Renamed all tracks with 3 letter prefixes, showing short name in list
On Replays tab there is a button to “Rename All Old” replays,ghosts and records
Game
New challenges and championships
Solid fluids (e.g. ice, lava, added in editor fluids mode, but solid and flat)
Rewind cooldown, after rewind 1 sec delay until next use is possible
Fixed game setup update in multiplayer (before was updated only after track change)
GUI – Tracks list
Now with short name, difficulty and length ratings (in default short view)
Selectable columns, and filtering, button Y, Ctrl-F twice to toggle
Common
Fixed black terrain on ATI/AMD Radeon cards
Many smaller fixes
Changed translations, more info for strings, own program to generate .pot, topic, Wiki
New user log files with errors and warnings only, ogre.err and ogre_ed.err
Editor
Easier on pipe creating, mark (key 8) now also moves pipe down (ctrl-8 the old way)
On pipe sections now marked on minimap as orange
Up/down keys working in pick window and objects lists, buildings groups list
Checkbox to ignore all “Wrong checkpoint” messages on track (for curly tracks where checks overlap road)
Better checkpoints in pipe, now in center and radius 1
Tweak
Reference graph for tires, loading tires
Code
Reworked Road_Rebuild.cpp, cleaner, data stucts, split to Road_Prepass.cpp
Split common .cfg to settings_com.h and cpp
specMap_rgb option in .mat (for rgb only specular maps)
Check if tracks and cars exist before replay load
Fixed most CppCheck warnings
How to Install Stunt Rally:
2.5 release will be available in PlayDeb repository very soon, so far it’s Stunt Rally 2.4, available for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, and Linux Mint 17. Check out the webpage.
1. Enable PlayDeb repository.
For Linux Mint, go to Start Menu -> Software Sources -> Additional repositories -> check out the box that says “archive.getdeb.net”.
For Ubuntu, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run:
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu trusty-getdeb games" >/etc/apt/sources.list.d/playdeb.list'
Quick tutorial shows that how to install the latest release of Exaile Music Player in Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.10 and/or Linux Mint 13/17.
Exaile is a music player that was originally conceived to be similar in style and function to KDE’s Amarok 1.4, but uses the GTK+ widget toolkit rather than Qt. It is written in Python and utilizes the GStreamer media framework.
Exaile incorporates many features from Amarok (and other media players) like automatic fetching of album art, handling of large libraries, lyrics fetching, Last.fm support, advanced tag editing, and optional iPod and MSC device support via plugins.
In addition, Exaile supports plugins that provide features such as ReplayGain support, an equalizer with presets, previewing tracks via a secondary soundcard, iPod support, and Moodbar integration.
So far, the latest release is Exaile 3.4.1 which was released on Nov 1, with below changes:
Works on OSX Mavericks and Yosemite
Fix the bug that Exaile did not work properly because of font issues in GTK
Other minor fixes
Install Exaile in Ubuntu:
Thanks to Web Upd8 Team, you can get the latest Exaile release from the PPA.
Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, paste and run below commands one by one:
Above command will add the Web Up8 Team Main PPA, update your system package lists, and finally install exaile as well as plugins. After that, you can receive future updates by running regular updates via Software Updater.
For those who don’t want to add the PPA, grab the .deb installer for exaile and plugins from launchpad page.
Pitivi Video Editor has reached version 0.94 recently. The new release features Gnome client-side decoration Gtk HeaderBar.
According to the release note, the main toolbar and menubar have been replaced by a headerbar and menubutton, saving a significant amount of precious vertical space and using the horizontal space better.
See the comparison -Pitivi 0.93 on the left, 0.94 on the right:
Besides that, Pitivi 0.94 fixed various bugs:
Fixed crashes due to a broken version of CoGL, CoGL APIs has been dropped.
Fixed crashes when running Pitivi outside of GNOME Shell due to Clutter GStreamer video output.
Ported to Python3
Text wrapping in the rendering progress dialog and title editor has been fixed
Effects can now be reordered within a clip’s properties
The default positioning of UI components (when starting from a fresh install) has been improved to be balanced properly
Various issues have been corrected regarding:
Drag and drop in the media library
Audio waveforms
Undo/redo
The user manual is now up to date with the state of the new Pitivi series
Undocked window components do not shift position on startup anymore
Docked window components do not shift position on startup anymore, when the window is not maximized.
The title editor’s UI has been simplified, and now supports decimal font sizes
Educational infobars throughout the UI have been tweaked to make their colors less intrusive
Timeline UI animations have been tweaked
Other fixes and translations updates
How to get Pitivi 0.94:
First you may check out your OS type, 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86_64), by going to shutdown menu (top-right corner gear button) -> “About This Computer”
Select download the all-in-one-bundle package from the link below:
Cinnamon Desktop 2.4 has been announced recently, which will be featured in Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” planned for the end of November and in LMDE 2 “Betsy” planned for Spring 2015.
According to the release note, the new Cinnamon Desktop brings below new features and improvements:
Little improvements on memory usage and responsiveness to make your experience smoother and more enjoyable.
Similar to Windows, “Super+e” now opens up the home directory.
Single-button touchpads are now supported and actions for 2-finger and 3-finger clicks are configurable.
Compositing in full-screen mode is now configurable and does not require to restart Cinnamon.
The desktop font is now configurable.
It is now possible to give the screensaver a custom date format, but also to change the font and the color of the text.
Theme and Background Settings were completely redesigned, Background Slideshow supported.
A “Slideshow” applet can be added to panel to control background slideshow.
The Network Settings were rebased on GNOME’s latest configuration module.
Add Notification and Privacy Settings.
Nemo now allows quick customization of folder icons with folder-color-switcher.
Install / Upgrade to Cinnamon in Ubuntu / Linux Mint:
NOTE that Cinnamon 2.4 is released a month earlier than Linux Mint 17.1 for the specific purpose to squash new bugs and to gather feedback. So there’ll be bugs.
To help test the new desktop, you can follow below steps to install or upgrade to Cinnamon 2.4 from a nightly build PPA:
For Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04, run commands below one by one in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):
Many businesses and universities use Cisco AnyConnect as their VPN solution. Although there is a native Linux client offered by Cisco, it is not very well supported, and in some cases the user does not have access to the client. Fortunately, there is a simple solution to this problem – thanks to OpenConnect.
OpenConnect is a client for Cisco’s AnyConnect VPN. It is free software, and is released under the GNU LGPL v2.1 . Getting connected to an AnyConnect VPN is easy with OpenConnect and the TUN/TAP kernel module that is built into the Linux kernel.
1. First run command below to active th TUN module:
sudo /sbin/modprobe tun
2. Install OpenConnect:
sudo apt-get install openconnect
3. Connect to VPN, run:
sudo openconnect yourvpn.example.com
It prompts you to type in username and password. Once these are authenticated, the VPN connection is established.
Keep the terminal window open while the VPN session is active. Network resources such as shared folders, NAS drives, servers, and workstations should now be available. To close the VPN session, press Ctrl+Z in the terminal window. Abruptly killing the terminal window without properly closing out of the VPN session can lead to issues when attempting to reconnect in the future. These issues can typically be resolved by restarting the machine.
For OpenConnect manual, run command man openconnect.
Google Cloud SDK has been finally made into Ubuntu Canonical Partners repository, which means you can install it directly from Ubuntu Software Center or by running apt-get command.
Google Cloud SDK is the command line tools for Google App Engine, Computer Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, and Cloud DNS.
For Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10 and future releases, you can follow below steps to install the Google Cloud SDK:
1. Add Canonical Partners repository.
Open Software & Updates, or Software Sources for Ubuntu 12.04 Precise and navigate to Other Software tab. Check the boxes that says “Canonical Partners”
2. Checking for updates by running Software Updater from the Unity Dash:
3. Finally install Google Cloud SDK via Synaptic Package Manager. Or click the button below to bring up Ubuntu Software Center and click the install button.
For command line, just run commands below one by one:
