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Liferea News Aggregator 1.11 Adds InoReader Support [PPA]

Last updated: August 14, 2014

Liferea 1.11.0, the first release of the new unstable release line, has been released with experimental InoReader and Reedah support.

Liferea is an open source feed reader and news aggregator with an embedded graphical browser (supports playing video, audio). It’s a Linux native app comes with below distinguishing Features:

Read articles when offline.
Synchronizes with InoReader, Reedah (since 1.11), TheOldReader, TinyTinyRSS.
Permanently save headlines in news bins.
Match items using search folders.
Play Podcasts in Liferea

According to the release note, the latest 1.11.0 also added tray icon plugin (removed build in tray icon support), category/folder support for TheOldReader, folder auto-removal for TinyTinyRSS & TheOldReader. And support for libindicate and libnotify has been removed (to be added as plugin maybe).

The new release has fixed below bugs:

Mistakenly claims “TinyTinyRSS source is not self-updating”
Crash on font resize at startup.
Honor preferences when opening links
Selecting last unread item in reduced feed list jumps to next feed
Fixed missing “Via” metadata type
Fixed incorrect new count reset handling in item_state.c and some of the node source implementations.
missing installation of liferea.convert file
liferea-add-feed doesn’t process feed:https//
startup race with LifereaHtmlView
Parsing errors not visible with dark themes
Do not use bold text for feeds/folders with unread items in the leftmost treeview
Liferea does not update feeds with TinyTinyRSS
subscription prop/source: not all fields and buttons visible
RTL comments appear incorrectly
Images do not autosize to fit the available space
Add TinyTinyRSS Enclosure Support
“Any of the following” search condition doesn’t work
Some dialogs scrolling areas do not request enough height
Doesn’t automatically update feed name and favicon for new feed
Update to new libxml2 buffer API
Avoid copying list in itemset_merge_items
Make Liferea use ETags and send If-None-Match
Support NOCONFIGURE for RPM builds

Known Bugs:

issue #48: Need to start Liferea twice simultaneously before it shows the window.

Install Liferea 1.11.0 in Ubuntu:

As an unstable release line it might have bugs. I’ve uploaded it into a new PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 12.04.

To add the PPA, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open the terminal and run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/liferea-unstable

If you want the latest stable release (1.10.10 so far), remove the previous PPA by running above command with parameter -r and then add the below one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps

After added an appropriate PPA, install or upgrade Liferea via Synaptic or Software Updater after checking for updates. Or just run below commands one by one:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install liferea

(Optional) To purge the PPA as well as downgrade Liferea, run:

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge

sudo ppa-purge ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/liferea-unstable

In Howtos Liferea News Aggregator, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10

Nvidia Driver 340.32 Fixed Various OpenGL & G-SYNC Bugs [PPA]

Last updated: August 13, 2014

Nvidia Team has announced the latest Linux driver 340.32 a few hours ago with new GPUs support, various OpenGL, G-SYNC monitor, and other important bug fixes.

According to the release highlights, the new driver added support for Quadro K420, Quadro K620, Quadro K2200, Quadro K4200, Quadro K5200 GPUs. Also there are various important fixes:

Fixed a regression that prevented the internal stereo infrared emitter built into some 3D Vision monitors from working.
Fixed a bug that could cause some Java-based OpenGL applications using JOGL to crash on startup on systems with Xinerama enabled.
Fixed a bug that could prevent OpenGL Framebuffer Objects (FBOs) from being properly redrawn after a modeswitch.
Fixed a memory leak that occurred when starting OpenGL applications.
Fixed a bug that prevented the EDID-Like Data (ELD) of audio-capable displays from being updated when hotplugged/unplugged.
Fixed a bug that caused Xid errors when using stereo mode 12 (HDMI 3D) on Quadro boards without an onboard stereo DIN connector.
Fixed a video corruption issue for VDPAU decoding of VC-1 and WMV video streams utilizing range remapping on Maxwell GPUs.
Fixed a “black window” bug in Ubuntu 14.04 when using the Xinerama and Composite extensions.
Fixed a bug that caused the screen’s contents to be shifted downward when a G-SYNC monitor is unplugged and replaced by a non-G-SYNC monitor.
Fixed a bug that prevented G-SYNC from working when a G-SYNC monitor was unplugged and plugged back in without a modeset.

Install Nvidia 340.32 in Ubuntu:

For Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 14.10, this driver has been made into the Xorg Edgers PPA. Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run the commands below one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install nvidia-340

If you would like to install it from the official package. Download the installer from:

Nvidia Driver for Unix

You may check out your OS type via System Settings -> Details and download the right package matches your os type.

64-bit os – Linux x86_64/AMD64/EM64T
32-bit os – Linux x86/IA32

Finally you can install the official .run installer by following this guide (skip step2, and replace the package name in the codes).

In Howtos Nvidia Driver

How To Map A Network Drive Onto Ubuntu 14.04 Permanently

Last updated: April 22, 2024

This simple tutorial shows you how to map a network drive, Windows share as example, onto Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with read and write permission permanently.

UPDATE-2024: This tutorial is outdated, and no longer works in current Ubuntu releases!!

All things will be done in a terminal window. Not familiar with Linux command? Don’t be afraid, just paste the command into terminal and hit enter to run one by one. There will be a few pictures to make things more clear.

Preparation:

There are a few preliminary actions we need to do before we can start mounting using cifs.

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. Paste the command below and run to create a mount point, you can replace ‘Ji-share’ to what you want.

sudo mkdir /media/Ji-share

2. Install cifs-utils, which provides support for cross-platform file sharing with Microsoft Windows, OS X and other Unix systems.

Install it from Ubuntu Software Center, or via below command:

sudo apt-get install cifs-utils

3. Edit the /etc/nsswitch.conf:

sudo gedit /etc/nsswitch.conf

Find the line looks like:

hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns

change it into:

hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] wins dns

4. Run below command so that your Ubuntu can resolve Windows computer name on a DHCP network.

sudo apt-get install libnss-winbind winbind

Reboot Ubuntu, or restart your network.

Mount (map) network drive:

Now edit the fstab file to mount network share on start up.

1. Make a backup by running the command below:

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab_old

If you need to restore your backup, run:

sudo mv /etc/fstab_old /etc/fstab

2. Create a credentials file via:

gedit ~/.smbcredentials

insert the username and password for accessing the remote share. Replace “Ji” & “741852963” with yours and save the file.

username=Ji
password=741852963

3. Run command to get your gid and uid. Replace handbook with your user name.

id handbook

4. Now edit the fstab by running the command:

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

Add below line (one line) to the end and save it. REPLACE WORDS IN RED!

//192.168.1.5/share /media/Ji-share cifs credentials=/home/handbook/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,gid=1000,uid=1000,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

Finally run sudo mount -a in terminal and you’ll get the network share mapped in Unity Launcher and Nautilus file browser:

In Howtos map a network drive, Ubuntu 14.04

Open Source Racing Game ‘Stunt Rally’ Gets A New Release

Last updated: August 10, 2014

Open source racing game Stunt Rally just reached 2.4 release with lots of updates.

According to the changelog, the new release comes with all 147 tracks (6 new, 12 old deleted, some renewed), 2 new sceneries (Crystals, GreeceWhite), 3 new cars (4 renewed, 2 old deleted). Also there are a few improvements on UI and game experiences.

For detailed changes, refer to the project page.

Install Stunt Rally in Ubuntu:

For 64-bit Linux so far (as well as Windows .exe) download the latest release from the link below and run the executable from its bin folder.

Download Stunt Rally

For Ubuntu 14.04 and Linux Mint 17, you can also get it from Playdeb repository. To do so, do below steps:

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, paste the command below and hit enter. Type in your password when prompt.

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu trusty-getdeb games"

2. Also run command to get the key:

wget -q -O- http://archive.getdeb.net/getdeb-archive.key | sudo apt-key add -

3. Finally install the game from Synaptic Package Manager (available in Software Center) after clicking reload button to update package lists:

In News open source racing game, stunt rally

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

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