The latest stable Opera browser for Linux has reached the 28 release. The new release features bookmark synchronization on all devices.
Opera team recently announced the bookmark syncing feature by releasing the Opera Stable 28, which is available on Opera for computers, Opera Mini for iOS and Opera for Android. To use this feature, you need an Opera Account and login from either Setting page or the little figure icon.
In addition, Opera 28 also brings:
a better integration with Mac OS, as “vibrancy” of the address field and improved Mac fullscreen mode have been added
If you have an previous Opera release installed, the Opera Stable Repository should be added on your system. (Go to Software & Updates -> Other Software tab, and check it out)
Then you can upgrade Opera through Software Updater after checking for updates.
NitroShare, a cross-platform network file transfer app, now is under active development since the previous 0.2 release was announced 2 years and a half ago.
Nitroshare is a cross-platform network file transfer application designed to make transferring any file to any device as painless as possible. It features:
Runs on Windows / Mac OS X / Linux
Automatic discovery of devices on the local network
Simple and intuitive user interface
Transfer entire directories
Completely free and open-source
NitroShare 0.2 in Ubuntu 14.04
Nitroshare project has been moved to Github.com. The developers are now working on the 0.3 release which features:
updating to Qt 5 from Qt 4
simplification of discovery
removal of limitation on file size during transfers
Install NitroShare:
The 0.3 release is still under development, it may contain bugs and uncompleted features. Besides building from the source via the description in project page, Ubuntu users can get it from the daily build PPA.
To install NitroShare 0.2 (stable release), download and install the binaries for Windows, Mac OS, Ubuntu, and/or OpenSUSE/Fedora from the left pane in the link below:
For Ubuntu:
1. you may first checkout the OS type, 32-bit (i386) or 64-bit (amd64), by going to top-right corner shutdown menu and clicking “About This Computer” option.
2. Then grab the “nitroshare_0.2_amd64.deb” or “nitroshare_0.2_i386.deb” depends on your OS type.
3. Finally click open the package with Ubuntu Software Center and install it.
This is a quick tip that shows you how to enable and tweak hot corners actions in (X)Ubuntu Xfce Desktop.
Brightside is a gnome support hot corners app which also works in Xfce Desktop. It allows you to assign configurable actions to occur while you rest the mouse in a corner of the screen.
Currently available actions comprise:
Fade out volume
Prevent screensaver starting
Start screensaver
Enter DPMS standby mode
Enter DPMS suspend mode
Enter DPMS off mode
Toggle showing desktop.
Custom action
Brightside can be installed via Ubuntu Software Center or by running below command in terminal:
sudo apt-get install brightside
Once installed, run brightside-properties (see previous pic.) command to start its configuration window and setup your hot corners actions.
To make brightside daemon start at login, go to Session and Startup window and add it under Application Autostart tab. See the picture below:
The open source video transcoder Handbrake 0.10.1 was released recently with various fixes. The developers are working on the next major release Handbrake 1.0.
In an attempt to move away from our yearly release cycle, we have decided to start publishing interim fix releases. 0.10.1 marks the first of these releases. It’s focus is to fix some common bugs rather than introduce the new features we are working on in the background for 1.0.
Release highlights in Handbrake 0.10.1:
Various bug fixes for all platforms and the core engine.
Updated x265 to 1.5 which brings numerous bug fixes and some performance improvements.
Install or Upgrade to Handbrake 0.10.1 in Ubuntu:
The developer has made the binaries into PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10, and/or Linux Mint 17/17.1.
To add the PPA, open terminal from the Dash or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run:
Webby is an open-source project similar to Fogger, it allows to use Facebook, Youtube, or any web app as a normal desktop app in Ubuntu.
Chrome, Firefox, Opera, IE… all these are web browsers with a big toolbar and tabs. In the new era of web apps, it doesn’t makes any sense. Webby allow to use Facebook, Youtube or any web app as a regular desktop apps, integrated with the OS, without tabs and using the default system launcher.
With Webby browser, you can turn any web page into a regular desktop app via 4 steps:
paste or type in the url
give a name
set a launcher icon.
finally click the Create app button.
Once Webby successfully created the app, you are able to launch it from the Unity Dash or App Menu immediately.
Below are the GMail and Facebook web apps created by Webby:
How to Install Webby in Ubuntu:
The developer has created an official PPA for this web app browser, currently available for Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04.
Open terminal from the Dash or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run commands below one by one:
NOTE for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS user: Since the app depends on GTK >=3.12, 14.04 Trusty needs Gnome 3 PPA and Gnome 3 Staging PPA (might broken your desktop) for the dependencies.
If you still want to try this browser in Ubuntu 14.04, run below commands to add the PPAs before running previous 3 commands:
Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of Linux Kernel 3.19.1 yesterday and urged all users of Kernel 3.19 series to upgrade as soon as possible.
According to the release note, Linux Kernel 3.19.1 brings improvements to ARM, x86, PowerPC, MIPS, ARM64, and s390 architectures, updated drivers for wireless, USB, ACPI, Bluetooth (ath3k), CPUFreq, HID, MD/RAID, MMC, DVB, PCI, SCSI, TTY, and XEN. Additionally, the XFS, UDF, NFS, JFFS2, OCFS2, EXT4, and Btrfs filesystems received various enhancements. Several core components have also been updated, and some Ceph, IPv4, and SunRPC issues have been fixed.
Install / Upgrade to Kernel 3.19 in Ubuntu:
The Ubuntu Kernel Team has made the binary packages for this kernel release, available for download at link below:
Tip: For Desktop machine running with a proprietary video driver, you may have to re-build/re-install the driver for the new kernel.
If for some reason, the new kernel does not work properly for you, reboot with the previous Kernel (Grub boot loader -> Advanced -> select previous kernel) and run below command to remove the Linux Kernel 3.19.1:
Oracle announced the 4.3.24 release of VirtualBox this Monday which improves stability and fixes regressions.
For Linux users, VirtualBox 4.3.24 fixes the Kernel 4.0 building issue for guest additions and virtual screens deactivation problem. Below is the full change log:
VMM: emulation fix for the ENTER instruction under certain conditions; fixes Solaris 10 guests (VT-x without unrestricted guest execution)
VMM: fix for handling NMIs on Linux hosts with X2APIC enabled
NAT/NAT Network: fix connection drops when the host’s DHCP lease was renewed (4.3.22 regression; Windows hosts only)
NAT: don’t crash on an empty domain list when switching the DNS host configuration (4.3.22 regression; Mac OS X hosts only)
PXE: re-enable it on Windows hosts (4.3.22 regression; Windows hosts only)
Shared Folders: fixed a problem with Windows guests (4.3.22 regression)
Audio: improved record quality when using the DirectSound audio backend
VBoxManage: when executing the controlvm command take care that the corresponding VM runtime changes are saved permanently
Windows Installer: properly install the 32-bit version of VBoxRes.dll on 32-bit hosts
Audacious player, a descendant of XMMS, has reached the 3.6 release at the end of February, which brings the new Qt-based user interface.
This Qt 5 based UI can be installed alongside the existing GTK+ and Winamp Classic interfaces. But is not yet as feature-rich as the existing interfaces, it will be the basis of a Mac OS X port of Audacious.
Audacious 3.6 switches back to GTK2 by default. It can still be built with GTK3 if desired, but GTK2 is recommended for any desktop environment other than GNOME 3.
There are also some other (requested) features in the 3.6 release:
The source code has been converted from C99 to C++11.
Audacious can now be built as a headless music player “daemon” with no GTK+ dependency.
playback now resumes in a paused state upon startup, so that you can press play to continue from where you left off. If desired
It is now possible to sort a playlist by genre.
A new “Open Containing Folder” command has been added to the GTK+ interface.
new effect plugin to remove leading and trailing silence in any song file.
New controls in the song information dialog
Support for the SID song lengths database has been restored.
Webupd8 Team is maintaining a PPA with audacious packages for Ubuntu users, but the 3.6 release is not included at the moment (Check out the PPA page).
Once it’s available in the PPA, open terminal from the Dash/Menu or by hitting Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run below commands one by one to add PPA, update system cache, and install/upgrade Audacious:
VLC 2.2.0, codename WeatherWax, finally goes stable. Here’s how to upgrade it in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS or Linux Mint 17.1 while it’s already made into Ubuntu repositories for 14.10 Utopic and 15.04 Vivid.
VLC 2.2.0 was released a few hours ago with numerous new features, fix more than one thousand bugs and improves the scope of the formats supported. Here are some of the new features:
Auto-rotation of phone movies, to fight Vertical Video Syndrome
Resume playback where you left off in all versions
Extensions API and repository to download extensions directly from the application
GPU 0-copy support for decoding and displaying using hardware
Subtitles download from the web, using OpenSubtitles
Audio core upgrade, notably to support short samples
Improved support for UltraHD codecs, H.265 and VP9
Support for BD-Java menus and overlay in Blu-Ray
Acceleration of VP9 and H.265/HEVC decoders
Support for encoding in H.265, Opus and VP9
Rewritten support for WMV, Ogg, MP4 and AVI, notably for seeking
Support for WebVTT, Ogg/VP8, Opus/MKV
Support for Digital Cinema Packages and encrypted DCP with KDM
Support for THP, Renderware videogames files
GPU accelerated auto-rotation, in OpenGL, Direct3D and Mediacodec
GPU 0-copy decoding-rendering for Linux using VDPAU
Support for HLSL shaders in Direct3D video output
OpenMAX IL improvements for Android, Linux and rPi
Support GStreamer codecs
Support for MMS split streams for audio selection (European Parliament)
Support FTPS (FTP/TLS) protocol
New decoder for VP8 and VP9 using libvpx for Linux distributions without avcodec
Improvements on Teletext, Subrip, and Tx3g subtitles
Support for MSN audio, Atrac3+, VP7, Bink, TAK, On2 AVC, DK3, DK4
Support for IMC, Vivo g723.1, Smacker, FIC, Auravision, Canopus Lossless
The 2.2.0 release is available in the Software Center for Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 15.04 out-of-the-box. Thanks to Doug McMahon, VLC 2.2.0 for 14.04 Trusty is available in this PPA.
1. To add the PPA, open terminal from menu or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/vlc
Please read the PPA description before press Enter to continue adding the PPA.
2. After adding the PPA, run below commands one by one to upgrade to the 2.2.0 release from previous version: