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Native Music Player DeaDBeeF Updates With Lots of Fixes and Improvements

Last updated: August 9, 2014

The lightweight Linux native music player DeaDBeeF has been updated to v0.6.2 with lots of new features, improvements and bug fixes.

DeadBeef is a fully-featured music player takes use of very few RAM. Since v0.6, it has a design mode (view -> design mode) that allows you to customize the UI the way you like.

The latest 0.6.2 release was released days ago on August 5th with lots of changes:

added “Stop playback after current album finished” (Aleksejs Popovs)
added ALAC, OPUS, OggFlac encoder presets (Ian Nartowicz)
added configure option to build artwork plugin without network support
added new widget for muting chiptune voices
added support for SHIFT-JIS charset detection/recoding (off by default)
fixed “stop after current” bug, which required player restart on every change
fixed –gui command line option
fixed GUI seeking accuracy bug
fixed bug in extended frame flags conversion between ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 tag formats
fixed crash when loading playlist from command line
fixed loading album art (APIC frame) from ID3v2.4 with data length indicator
fixed non-utf8 locale support in console
fixed support for vorbis files with more than 6 channels
fixed playlist count limit bug
fixed preserving file permissions after editing ogg files
fixed several bugs in PLS playlist format support
improved FreeBSD and OSX support
improved charset detection in CUE and ID3v1
improved album art column rendering/resizing (Christian Boxdörfer)
improved the build system and the output build quality
improved detection of config changes, to avoid unnecessary config writing
improved support for reading APEv2 and ID3v1 tags from large files (>2Gb)
updated licensing information in all plugins, to include information about all used libraries
aac: added workaround for 7 channel sound playback bug
ape: play files with format >= 4.11, improved error handling
artwork: many fixes and improvements, including support for non-tagged files
dumb: added option to configure internal volume
ffmpeg: fixed bitrate calculation
ffmpeg: fixed replaygain support
flac: fixed/improved many things in tag reading and writing code
gme: added support for loading gzipped modules from supported archives (e.g. from zips)
gtkui, pltbrowser: better accessibility
gtkui: added option to disable seekbar overlay
gtkui: added option to display playback state as unicode characters, instead of bitmaps (works better on HDPI screens)
gtkui: added support for design mode to more widgets (seekbak, volumebar, playback toolbar)
gtkui: fixed bug in gtk_drag_check_threshold handler
gtkui: numerous fixes in widget layout code
gtkui: single/double clicking on album art column will select/play the album/group (Christian Boxdörfer)
lastfm: added support for scrobbling radio streams (off by default)
lastfm: added support for scrobbling tracks shorter than 30 sec (off by default)
lastfm: improved support for musicbrainz track id
mms: fixed few buffer overflow bugs, improved responsiveness
mp3: optimized scanner: less backward seeks during frame syncing
shellexec: fixed escaping of single quotes, prevent opening copies of shxui dialogs
vfs_zip: huge speed improvements
vorbis, oggflac: new tagging code (Ian Nartowicz)
improved plugin duplicate checking
fixed RIFF WAVE header writing in converter
fixed 8bit png crash in album art plugin (Ian Nartowicz)
static builds now use -O3 -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=0 compiler flags
fixed few issues with implementation of the Play button
improved tag writing in converter
fixed issues with “background jobs are running” warning
changed all wiki links to point to the new wiki on github
improved streamer event handling, to make the GUI more responsive and stable
fixed cleaning up downloaded temporary playlist files
Fixed skipping bad FLAC__METADATA_TYPE_CUESHEET blocks in FLAC
added support for uppercase .CUE extension
added “mpga” extension support (mp3)
fixed seeking backwards using hotkeys when in the beginning of a track

Install DeaDBeeF in Ubuntu:

Download the .deb package that matches your OS type – 32-bit (i386) or 64-bit (amd64) – from the link below:

Download DeaDBeeF .deb

Then double click the package to open it with Ubuntu Software Center and click install.

In News deadbeef music player

Ubuntu Tips – Display Asterisks When Typing Your Password in Terminal

Last updated: August 8, 2014

When you run a command started with sudo in Ubuntu terminal, it asks you to insert the password for your user with no visual feedback as you type.

For beginners who feel uncomfortable with this terminal feature, below will teach you how to tweak your Ubuntu so that Gnome terminal (and TTY console) displays asterisks when you type in your password.

Terminal with password feedback by displaying asterisks

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open a terminal window. Or open terminal from Unity Dash.

2. Paste the below command in terminal and hit enter. Type in your password when prompt.

sudo visudo

It will open the configuration file “/etc/sudoers” in terminal with nano editor.

3. Make a new line:

Defaults pwfeedback

under the line:

Defaults env_reset

So it looks like this: (NOTE that the space between Defaults and pwfeedback should be a tab)

4. Now save the changes. Press Ctrl+X, type y to answer yes, press Enter to accept default file name.

Close this terminal window and done.

In Howtos Enable Password Feedback, terminal

Cinnamon DE Lands in Official Repositories of Ubuntu 14.10

Last updated: August 7, 2014

Cinnamon, one of the default desktop environments for Linux Mint, now is available in the official repositories of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn.

Which means you don’t have to add any third-party PPA, just search for and install cinnamon from Ubuntu Software Center. Available version is v2.2.14.

Cinnamon is a GTK+ 3-based desktop environment. The project originally started as a fork of the GNOME Shell. It was initially developed by (and for) the Linux distribution Linux Mint.

As the description says:

Cinnamon is a desktop environment which provides advanced innovative features and a traditional user experience.

The desktop layout is similar to GNOME 2. The underlying technology is forked from gnome-shell. The emphasis is put on making users feel at home and providing them with an easy to use and comfortable desktop experience.

Once you installed it from Software Center. Log out current session and select log in with cinnamon in the greeter:

Enjoy!

In Howtos cinnamon, Ubuntu 14.10

digiKam 4.2.0 Released, Install it in Ubuntu 14.04

Last updated: April 24, 2024

digiKam, open-source image organizer and tag editor, has reached version 4.2.0 one days ago on August 5th. The developer team announced in the website:

Dear digiKam fans and users,

The digiKam Team is proud to announce the release of digiKam Software Collection 4.2.0. This release includes important features to simplify photograph workflow :

New view on left sidebar to search quickly items with assigned Labels.

On tags tree-view a new option to show items with no tag.

These features have been introduced by Mohamed Anwer Google Summer of Code project which have been completed in time and judged ready for production.

As usual, we have worked hard to close your reported issues since the previous stable release 4.1.0. A list of the issues closed in digiKam 4.2.0 is available through the KDE Bugtracking System.

Install / Upgrade to digiKam 4.2 in Ubuntu 14.04:

Besides building from the source tarball, you can upgrade digiKam through this third-party PPA.

Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run the commands below one by one to add the PPA and install or upgrade digiKam in Ubuntu 14.04:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:philip5/extra

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install digikam

If you’ve upgrade to KDE 4.14 through Kubuntu Backports PPA, run below commands instead to avoid dependencies issue.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:philip5/kubuntu-backports

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install digikam

That’s it. Enjoy!

In Howtos digikam, Ubuntu 14.04

How to Mount Your Box.com Storage in Ubuntu Desktop

Last updated: August 6, 2014

This quick tutorial shows you how to mount and map your Box.com storage in Ubuntu desktop so that you can access your cloud storage within Nautilus file browser.

There are many cloud storage services available for Ubuntu Linux. Box.com is one of them that provides 10 GB free web space with 250 MB file upload size. It allows to access directly through WebDav protocol.

There is an open source project Box2Tux, it makes the configuration of WebDav protocol easy. All you need to do is insert your Box account name and password, then it allows you to access the cloud storage directly in Nautilus file browser by mounting it automatically at start up.

NOTE that normal user only have read permission to the mounted storage, you need to open Nautilus with root for full access (drop and drop to upload, delete, etc…). To do so, run gksudo nautilus in terminal or in Alt+F2 ‘Run a command’ dash.

Mount Box.com Storage in Ubuntu:

1. First of first, install davfs2 (WebDav) from Ubuntu Software Center.

You can click the link below to bring up Softare Center and click the install button.

Click Install Davfs2

2. Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, paste the commands below and run one by one:

Reconfigure davfs2 and select Yes to allow non-root user to mount the WebDav resource:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure davfs2

Download Box2Tux:

wget https://github.com/alfredobonino/Box2Tux/archive/master.zip

Extract the downloaded package:

unzip master.zip

Navigate to the result folder:

cd Box2Tux-master/

Give permission and run the box2tux:

chmod +x box2tux && ./box2tux

Input your box.com account and password when prompt:

Once done, you should get box.com mounted just as a network drive on Unity Launcher. Enjoy!

via: github, lffl

In Howtos mount box.com storage

Install/Upgrade to Linux Kernel 3.16 in Ubuntu 14.04/12.04

Last updated: August 6, 2014

The latest Linux Kernel 3.16 has been released. Linus Torvalds wrote in the Linux Kernel Mailing List (lkml.org):

So nothing particularly exciting happened this week, and 3.16 is out there.

And as usual (previous release being the exception) that means that the merge window for 3.17 is obviously open. And for the third time in a row, the timing sucks for me, as I have travel coming up the second week of the merge window. Many other core developers will be traveling too, since it’s just before the kernel summit in Chicago.

So we’ll see how the next merge window goes, but I’m not going to worry about it overmuch. If I end up not having time to do all the merges, I might delay things into the week of the kernel summit, but I’ll hope to get most of the big merging done this upcoming week before any travel takes place, so maybe it won’t come to that. So this is just a heads-up that the merge window *might* be extended.

Anyway, back to the changes since -rc7: it’s really fairly small stuff randomly all over, with a third being architecture updates, a third drivers, and a third “misc” (mainly mm and networking). The architecture stuff is small ARM updates (mostly DT), some x86 Xen fixups, some random small powerpc things. The shortlog gives a good idea of what kind of stuff it all is, but it’s really just 83 commits (plus merges and the release commit) and about a third of them are marked for stable.

So while 3.16 looked a bit iffy for a while, things cleared up nicely, and there was no reason to do extra release candidates like I feared just a couple of weeks ago.

What’s New in Linux Kernel 3.16:

Samsung Exynos multi-platform support so that the Samsung ARM SoC kernel support is on-par with many other ARM SoCs and the ability to have a single kernel image support multiple ARM devices.
Better upstream Jetson TK1 ARM development platform support.
Broadwell support within Intel’s P-State driver.
Dell free-fall driver support to see if your Latitude laptop is falling.
A new Synaptics input driver.
Blk-mq is nearly feature complete as the multi-queue block layer implementation.
For those still with an old Nokia N900 smart-phone, the modem is now supported by the mainline Linux kernel.
Initial GK20A support as the NVIDIA Kepler-based GPU within the Tegra K1 SoC. The ARM hardware support in general has improved a fair amount with this new kernel.
Nouveau support for Kepler GPU re-clocking albeit the support varies and there’s more improvements to be made.
Intel Cherryview support for the upcoming Intel Atom SoC succeeding Bay Trail / Valley View graphics.
AMD Radeon graphics are faster with DRM improvements made in this latest kernel release.

via: phoronix

Install / Upgrade to Kernel 3.16 in Ubuntu:

Be aware that proprietary drivers may or may not work correctly with this kernel version. You need to rebuilt (or install) your video driver after kernel update.

The Ubuntu Kernel Team has made the .deb installers which are available at:

Download Kernel 3.16 DEBs

Check your OS type (32-bit = i386, 64-bit = amd64) via System Settings -> Details and download the generic or low latency packages and install them in below orders:

linux-headers-3.16.0-xxxxxx_all.deb
linux-headers-3.16.0-xxx-generic / lowlatency-xxx_i386/amd64.deb
linux-image-3.16.0-xxx-generic / lowlatency-xxx_i386/amd64.deb

For command line, you can run below commands one by one to download and install the new kernel:

1. For 32-bit system:

cd /tmp/

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.16-utopic/linux-headers-3.16.0-031600-generic_3.16.0-031600.201408031935_i386.deb

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.16-utopic/linux-headers-3.16.0-031600_3.16.0-031600.201408031935_all.deb

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.16-utopic/linux-image-3.16.0-031600-generic_3.16.0-031600.201408031935_i386.deb

sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-3.16.0-*.deb linux-image-3.16.0-*.deb

2. For 64-bit system:

cd /tmp/

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.16-utopic/linux-headers-3.16.0-031600-generic_3.16.0-031600.201408031935_amd64.deb

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.16-utopic/linux-headers-3.16.0-031600_3.16.0-031600.201408031935_all.deb

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.16-utopic/linux-image-3.16.0-031600-generic_3.16.0-031600.201408031935_amd64.deb

sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-3.16.0-*.deb linux-image-3.16.0-*.deb

Reboot and done.

If for some reason this kernel release doesn’t work properly for you, reboot into previous kernel (Grub -> Advanced -> select previous kernel) and run this command to remove Linux Kernel 3.16:

sudo apt-get remove linux-headers-3.16.0-* linux-image-3.16.0-*

Finally update grub menu:

sudo update-grub

In Howtos Linux Kernel, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04

Upgrade / Install LibreOffice 4.3 via PPA in Ubuntu 14.04/12.04

Last updated: August 3, 2014

LibreOffice, the default office suite in Ubuntu, has finally reached version 4.3 with a large number of improvements and new features.

The packages has been made into 4.3 series PPA – available for Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 12.04 – which will provide future minor release updates (4.3.1, 4.3.2, 4.3.3 …).

What’s New in LibreOffice:

Better OOXML interoperability, and support of legacy Mac file formats
Better comment management, and highly intuitive spreadsheet handling
3D models in Impress, and support for “monster” paragraphs
LibreOffice 4.3 also support “monster” paragraphs exceeding 65,000 characters
See the release note for details

Upgrade to LibreOffice 4.3 in Ubuntu:

1. Add the 4.3 series PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 and their derivatives.

Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, paste the command below and hit enter to run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/libreoffice-4-3

2. Open Software & Updater from Unity dash. After checking for updates, you’ll see the latest LibreOffice packages available in the update list. Click the Install Now to install updates.

You can also run the commands below to do the upgrade process:

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade

That’s it. Enjoy!

In Howtos LibreOffice, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04

Texmaker 4.3 Released, Install it in Ubuntu 14.04/12.04

Last updated: August 2, 2014

Texmaker, an open source LaTeX editor with an integrated PDF viewer, has finally reached v4.3 with new features and translation updates.

Texmaker is entirely a Qt app that works on Windows, Linux and Macos. The editor includes full unicode support, inline spell checking, auto-completion, code folding and rectangular block selection. Regular expressions are also supported for the find-and-replace actions.

The latest Texmaker 4.3 was released on August 1st, 2014 with below changes:

a visual diff view has been added to the “source viewer” (differences between the current files loaded in the editor and in the “source viewer”) based on jsdifflib from Chas Emerick (BSD license)
when a command fails, the command is now displayed with the error message “Could not start the command”
an “reload all documents from file” option has been added to the “File” menu (users request)
if a “completion.txt” file is found in the same directory than texmaker.exe on windows, in the “/usr/share/texmaker/” folder on linux and in the “Resources” subdirectory of the .app package on macosx, all items from this file will be added automatically for the autocompletion (the syntax must be the same than for the .”Customize completion” option of the “User” menu.
an option to launch the “Clean” tool when exiting the program has been added (users request)
a texmaker man page and a texmaker.menu file have been added in the “utilities” directory of the source (thanks to Bernd Warken for the man-page)
the cs, el, es, hu and se translations have been updated (thanks to all the translators)

Install Texmaker 4.3 in Ubuntu:

The official website provides .deb installer available for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, and Ubuntu 12.10.

First check out your OS type, 32-bit (i386) or 64-bit (amd64), by going to System Settings -> Details.

Then download the package that matches your Ubuntu edition and os type:

Download Texmaker

Finally double-click the package in file browser to open it with Ubuntu Software Center and click install.

In Howtos LaTeX editor, texmaker, Ubuntu 14.04

Skype 4.3 Now Is Available in Canonical Partners Repository

Last updated: August 2, 2014

The latest skype for Linux 4.3 was released in the middle of June with updated UI, new cloud-based Group chat experience. Now it’s available in the Canonical Partners repository for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 and their derivatives.

From now on, enable Canonical Partners repository via Software & Updates utility, then you are able to upgrade to Skype 4.3 by running regular system updates via Software Updater

What’s New in Skype 4.3:

An updated UI
Our new cloud-based Group Chat experience
More reliable file transfer support when using multiple devices at once
Greater accessibility by blind and visually impaired users
PulseAudio 3.0 and 4.0 support
Lot of bug fixes
Skype 4.3 release note.

Install / Upgrade to Skype 4.3:

1. Open Software & Updates or Software Sources from Unity Dash, go to Other Software tab and enable Canonical Partners repository.

2. To install Skype, just search for and install it from Ubuntu Software Center.

To upgrade Skype, open Software Updater, after checking for updates, you’ll see Skype 4.3 available for update:

If you are familiar with command line, just run:

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install skype

In Howtos skype, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10

Webilder – Wallpaper Changer With Photos from Flickr & Webshots

Last updated: August 1, 2014

There are a few applications for Linux desktop that change the wallpaper automatically. Webilder is one of them that rotates your wallpaper with photos directly downloaded from flickr and webshots.com.

The application provides an indicator applet for Ubuntu Unity and GNOME that allows you to downloads the most interesting photos from Flickr, browser photo collection, and select next photo (as wallpaper).

In its preferences window, you can set Webilder to automatically download photos every day, download Flickr photos that match your given tags, view and download Webshots photos with an account.

Features:

downloads the most interesting photos from Flickr.
view Webshots photos on your Linux desktop (requires Webshots account).
downloads Flickr photos that match tags (for example: beach,party)
downloads photos from Flickr users of your choice.
automatically downloads new photos for you every day.
change your wallpaper every few minutes.
import webshots collections (wbz or wbc formats).
photo collection browser that will let you view the images in fullscreen, or set them as a wallpaper.
browser integration for Webshots – downloaded images are automatically added to your collection.
command-line photo downloader webilder_downloader

Install Webilder in Ubuntu:

The website provides the .deb package for Ubuntu and its derivatives, download it from the link below and double-click to open with Ubuntu Software Center and finally click install:

Download Webilder (webilder_xxx.deb)

Once installed, open Webilder indicator form Unity Dash or app menu. It will start automatically the next time you log in.

In Howtos Flickr, Ubuntu 14.04, wallpaper changer