UbuntuHandbook

Firefox 135.0 Released! Extend AI ChatBot Support for All Users

Last updated: February 5, 2025 — Leave a comment

Mozilla Firefox announced new 135.0 release on Tuesday. See what’s new in this monthly release.

The new release enhanced some features to make them work for all users. AI Chatbot, the experimental feature that’s introduced since Firefox 130, now is available to all users.

Just go to Settings -> Firefox Labs, then select AI between Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, Le Chat Mistral, then you may chat with AI in sidebar after login.

Firefox AI Chatbot made available to all users

Besides AI, the new browser release also extended the credit card autofill feature to all users globally, made the refreshed New Tab layout to users in all countries where Stories are available.

And, the built-in translations now support translating Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. While Russian is now available as a target language to translated into.

New Tab layout now works in all countries support Stories

Firefox 135 includes safeguards to prevent sites from abusing the history API by generating excessive history entries. Which however make navigating back and forward buttons difficult by cluttering the history.

Other changes in the new browser release include:

New “Close current tab” option in Ctrl+Q quit confirm dialog.
Enforce certificate transparency, requiring web servers to provide sufficient proof.
Roll out the CRLite certificate revocation checking mechanism.
Remove “Do Not Track” checkbox, user may use “Tell websites not to sell or share my data” setting instead.
Rename “Copy Clean Link” menu item to “Copy Without Site Tracking”.
Use XZ instead of BZ2 for smaller Linux binaries.
And, various security fixes.

The release also includes some web development changes. It introduced a new console command $$$ allows to search the page including within shadow roots. It added support for the WebAuthn getClientCapabilities() method, and a post-quantum key exchange mechanism (mlkem768x25519) for HTTP/3.

How to Get Firefox 135.0

The release note and official packages are available at the link below:

Firefox 135.0 Release Note

For Ubuntu 22.04+ users with default Firefox Snap package, it will automatically update to the latest, though user may manually check updates via command:

sudo snap refresh firefox

For native DEB package, user can choose either the official apt repository or MozillaTeam PPA, and here’s a step by step tutorial talking about it.

In News Firefox, web

How to Enable HDR (Experimental) in Ubuntu 24.04 | 24.10

Last updated: February 5, 2025 — Leave a comment

This is a beginner’s guide shows how to enable the experimental HDR feature in Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation, and other Linux with recent GNOME.

HDR is a technology allowing to transmit high dynamic range videos and images to compatible displays. KDE has HDR support in Plasma 6, and GNOME is going to add HDR toggle option in next v48 release.

GNOME to add HDR toggle option in next v48

In Howtos HDR

NVIDIA 570.86.16 Beta Driver added VRR Support on Multiple Monitors

Last updated: February 3, 2025 — Leave a comment

NVIDIA released first Beta of the 570 driver series for Linux users a few days ago. See what’s new in this new driver.

NVIDIA Linux driver introduced VRR support for Wayland since 560 driver series. It’s a feature that adjust the monitor’s refresh rate on the fly, to match the frame rate of output signal from the graphics card.

The feature is useful for games to eliminate screen tearing and also lowers power consumption. And the new 570.86.16 driver enhanced it by supporting variable refresh rate (VRR) on systems with multiple monitors.

NVIDIA Settings 570

In News nvidia

LibreOffice 25.2.0 is out! Auto Signature, ODF 1.4, New Theming System

Last updated: February 6, 2025 — Leave a comment

LibreOffice, the popular free open-source office suite, rolls out the new 25.2.0 release! LibreOffice 25.2 is the third release series after switched to date-based version numbering system. The official Flatpak package has been updated for all Linux users, ~~though the announcement is not ready yet at the moment~~.

In News LibreOffice, office

How to Block IPs in Nginx / WordPress Login Page

Last updated: January 30, 2025 — Leave a comment

This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to configure Nginx to block certain IPs or IP range from accessing your website, and block all others while only you (and specified IPs) can access the wordpress login pages.

This site was under attack a few days ago. Someone made tens of thousands of constant requests that slowed down the server response. And, here’s what I did to manually block attacker’s IPs and restrict access to the login page.
Continue Reading…

In Howtos web

Plank-Reloaded – The Simplest Dock that’s Fully Functional

Last updated: January 30, 2025 — 3 Comments

Remember Plank, the simplest dock on the planet? There’s now a free open-source fork to make it fully functional in recent Linux Distributions.

Plank is a 14 years old application that provides an iOS bottom bar style dock app launcher, that’s great for lightweight Linux Desktops. The goal is to provide just what a dock needs and absolutely nothing more.

Plank seems not in active development, though it still works in recent Linux Distributions. However, it has compatibility issues and broken docklets/applets. For those who’re still using or prefer this dock, there’s now an open-source fork worth a try.

Plank in Linux Mint 22

It’s Plank-Reloaded, a fork of the original Plank project that focuses on Cinnamon desktop compatibility and modernized features.

With the new dock, the Clock docklet will no longer crash. And, it features updated digital clock layout as well as a calendar when clicking on the icon.

The Battery docklet has been updated with modern UPower integration. And, the “Matte” theme has been updated to look better, along with a light variant that based on the Arian theme.

New Plank Matte and Matte-light Themes

Other changes include general code cleanup and bug fixes. If you like it, you may report issues and request features by visiting the project page.

How to Install Plank-Reloaded

NOTE: Plank so far does NOT work on Wayland.

According to this feature request, the software developer is going to add pre-built .deb packages for Debian/Ubuntu, and Flatpak package for all Linux users.

At the moment, Arch & its based systems can install from the AUR repository.

While Ubuntu & Linux Mint users (tested on Linux Mint 22.1 & Ubuntu 24.04) can run the commands below one by one in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) to build from the source (this is the official guide with minor modification).

First, remove plank in case you installed the original plank package from system repository:
```
sudo apt remove plank libplank-common libplank1
```

Then, install the dependency libraries for building/running the dock:

sudo apt install git autogen autoconf autopoint libtool make valac libgnome-menu-3-0 libgnome-menu-3-dev libxml2-utils libgee-0.8-dev libbamf3-dev libwnck-3-0 libwnck-3-dev bamfdaemon

Next, clone the source:

git clone https://github.com/zquestz/plank-reloaded.git

Navigate into the source folder you just cloned:
```
cd plank-reloaded
```
Finally, run command to configure, build, and install plank-reloaded:
```
./bootstrap
```
```
make -j2
```
```
sudo make install
```
Here, -j2 option in second make command means to start 2 thread in parallel. You may change the number according how many CPU cores you have.

After successfully built the Plank-Reloaded, you may either run plank command in terminal to start the dock, or add it as startup program to auto-start at login.

Uninstall:

Until you removed the source folder, you may navigate into that folder in terminal and run command below to uninstall:

sudo make uninstall

In App Review App Launcher, Dock

Shotcut 25.01 Released with Built-in File Browser & New Filters

Last updated: January 26, 2025 — 1 Comment

Shotcut video editor released new 25.01 version today. See what’s new in this monthly release and how to install guide for Ubuntu.

Shotcut 25.01 introduced built-in file browser that can be toggled on/off through either “View -> Files” menu or Ctrl+Shift+4 keyboard shortcut. In addition, there’s new “Show in Files” option in Properties and Jobs, to quickly locate the file in built-in file browser.

In News shotcut, video editor

GNOME 48 Alpha Released! Battery Charge Limiting & Screen Time Limiting

Last updated: January 25, 2025 — Leave a comment

The first alpha release of GNOME 48 is out today! See what’s new in the desktop environment that will be default in next Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora Workstation 42.

First, GNOME 48 introduced new core app called Decibels. It’s a simple audio player that features playback speed adjustment, easy seek controls, and shows the waveform of the track.

GNOME 48

In News Gnome

Wine 10.0 Released with High-DPI Scaling & Full ARM64EC Support

Last updated: January 23, 2025 — 2 Comments

Wine, the popular free open-source compatibility layer for running Windows apps/games in Linux/Unix, announced new 10.0 major release on Tuesday!

The new release features Hi-DPI scaling support. Instead of exposing high-DPI sizes to applications that don’t expect it, it now automatically scale non-DPI aware windows.

In News wine

VirtualBox 7.1.6 is out! RHEL 9.6 kernel Support & Screen Flickering Fix

Last updated: January 22, 2025 — Leave a comment

Oracle announced new Virtualbox 7.1.6 release this Tuesday with various bug-fixes, performance improvements, and minor new features.

VirtualBox had heavy screen tearing and flickering issue in Linux VMs running with recent Kernel and Wayland for a period of time, that’s why I switched to QEMU/KVM.

Since the last 7.1.4, VirtualBox greatly improved the flickering, black screen and other screen update issues. In the new release, it also fixed issue with Linux guest screen flickering when guest was using VMSVGA graphics adapter.

Meaning now recent Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation and other Linux with Wayland work great again in VirtualBox virtual machines!