Archives For jimingkui

Rhythmbox Music Player

Rhythmbox is the default music player for Ubuntu Unity and Gnome. It has reached version 3.1 while Ubuntu 14.04/14.10 still provides Rhythmbox 3.0.x.

Rhythmbox 3.1 comes with assorted bug fixes, GTK 3.14+ compatible, and now it includes an AppData file. It’s worth upgrading the player if you have upgraded to Gnome 3.14 or ever encountered below bugs:

  • “Edit > Preferences > General > Visibile Columns > BPM” missing mnemonic
  • UPNP servers do not get removed after they become unavailable
  • SendTo plugin does not work with music files containing apostrophe
  • Rhythmbox incorrectly reads the year tag of m4a files
  • support libsecret 0.18 (SecretUnstable to Secret API change)
  • rhythmbox crashes upon “Jump to Playing Song”
  • Song properties dialog “Basic” tab, “Comment” keyboard mnemonic is same as “Composer”
  • Notification disappears when I pause my music
  • New Radio Paradise URLs
  • The latest rhythmbox needs atleast libglib 2.34
  • Wording used for importing music in import screen is not clear
  • rhythmbox crashes with SIGSEGV due to double free in rb_podcast_parse_channel_free
  • rhythmbox / audioscrobbler fails if built from separate build dir
  • Inequal sizing and alignment in rhythmbox UI.
  • grilo: Do not free GrlRegistry
  • rhythmbox-client –stop
  • Rhythmbox 3.0.2 crashes if attempting to load pls stream before any other type
  • AAC tags are improperly parsed for the “year” field
  • daap source compilation failure with ubuntu 14.04
  • Rating stars are not vertically aligned in GtkTreeView listing
  • Rhythmbox crash when adding songs to a playlist
  • Right-clicking on song causes Segmentation fault
  • song-info ui files need update
  • rhythmbox.appdata.xml.in is in wrong location

How to Upgrade Rhythmbox:

Thanks to fossfreedom, the 3.1 release has been made into PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 and derivatives.

To add the PPA, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run the command below:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:fossfreedom/rhythmbox

After that, launch Software Updater (or Synaptic Package Manager) and you’ll see Rhythmbox available for upgrade after checking for updates.

Upgrade Rhythmbox Music Player

Weather Indicator / widget

This quick tutorial shows you how to install my-weather-indicator, an open-source weather indicator and desktop widget, in Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic.

My-weather-indicator is a Unity indicator applet developed by atareao team. It displays the weather information, forecast, evolution, and forecast map of selected locations on Ubuntu panel. It also supports desktop widget.

Yahoo, Open Weather Map, wunderground.com, World Weather Online weather services are supported.

Weather indicator and widget

Install My-weather-indicator:

Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run commands below one by one to add the developer’s PPA and install the indicator:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao 

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install my-weather-indicator

If you don’t want to add the PPA, grab the .deb installer directly from Launchpad Page.

The first time you launch the indicator, the Preferences window opens, there you can set your location, second location, show widget or not, widget skin, weather services, units, auto-start, refresh frequency, and more.

My-weather-indicator settings

RawTherapee Raw Image Processor

The open source raw image processing program RawTherapee 4.2 has been released recently with new features and speed, stability and memory usage optimizations.

RawTherapee is an advanced program for developing raw photos and for processing non-raw photos. It is non-destructive, makes use of OpenMP, supports all the cameras supported by dcraw and carries out its calculations in a high precision 32bit floating point engine. RawTherapee supports JPEG, PNG, and TIFF as output format for processed photos.

RawTherapee 4.2 in Ubuntu 14.04

What’s new in RawTherapee 4.2:

  • RawTherapee-4.2 includes many speed, precision, stability and memory usage optimizations. As such, users of 32-bit operating systems may now find that they can enjoy more stability while using the most memory intensive tools. Of course users of 64-bit systems benefit from this as well. Refer to the full changelog for more information.
  • Powerful color toning tool.
  • Curve control of luminance noise reduction.
  • Median filter in the noise reduction tool.
  • Film simulation tool using Hald CLUT pattern files.
  • Command-line option to define bit depth of output TIFF/PNG file.
  • Multiple improvements to dead/hot pixel handling, see RawPedia.
  • Filename of currently opened image shown in the titlebar.
  • Clip control for the flat-field correction tool.
  • Demosaic method “Mono” for monochrome cameras, and “None” for no demosaicing.
  • Copy/paste processing profile keyboard shortcuts for right-handed users using Ctrl/Shift-Insert.
  • Update to dcraw 9.22 1.467
  • New or improved support for:
    • Canon EOS 7D
    • Canon EOS 7D Mark II
    • Canon PowerShot G7 X
    • Canon PowerShot SX60 HS
    • Fujifilm cameras using the X-Trans sensor
    • Fujifilm X30
    • Hasselblad H4D-31
    • Hasselblad H4D-50
    • Hasselblad H4D-60
    • Hasselblad H5D-40
    • Hasselblad H5D-50c
    • Mamiya Leaf Credo 40
    • Mamiya Leaf Credo 50
    • Mamiya Leaf Credo 60
    • Mamiya Leaf Credo 80
    • Monochrome cameras such as Leica Monochrome
    • Nikon D610
    • Nikon D700
    • Nikon D750
    • Nikon D800E
    • Nikon D810
    • Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ1000
    • Panasonic Lumix DMC-GM5
    • Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX100
    • Phase One IQ250
    • Phase One P40
    • Phase One P65+
    • Sony Alpha ILCE-5100
    • Sony NEX-C3

Install / Upgrade RawTherapee in Ubuntu 14.04:

Thanks to Dariusz Duma, the binary package has been made into PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Linux Mint 17.

To add the PPA and install RawTherapee 4.2, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal, run the commands below one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dhor/myway

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install rawtherapee

Install RawTherapee from PPA

For those who don’t want to add the PPA, grab the .deb installer directly from the Launchpad Page.

Ubuntu 14.10 And Its Flavors Officially Released

Last updated: October 24, 2014

Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn

Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn and its flavors including the newest Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Gnome, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, and Ubuntu Studio were officially released today.

According to the release note, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 3.16-based kernel, a new AppArmor with fine-grained socket control, and more.

Ubuntu Desktop has seen incremental improvements, with newer versions of GTK and Qt, updates to major packages like Firefox and LibreOffice, and improvements to Unity, including improved High-DPI display support.

Ubuntu Server 14.10 includes the Juno release of OpenStack, alongside deployment and management tools that save devops teams time when deploying distributed applications – whether on private clouds, public clouds, x86 or ARM servers, or on developer laptops. Several key server technologies, from MAAS to Ceph, have been updated to new upstream versions with a variety of new features.

Kubuntu 14.10:

Kubuntu 14.10 comes in two flavours, the stable Plasma 4 running the desktop we know from previous releases, and a tech preview of the next generation Plasma 5 for early adopters.

See: www.kubuntu.org/news/kubuntu-14.10.

Lubuntu 14.10:

Lubuntu 14.10 mainly features:

  • General bug fix release as we prepare for LXQt.
  • Many LXDE components have been updated with bug fix releases.
  • An update of the artwork (more icons, theme update, more compatibilities …).

See: wiki.ubuntu.com/UtopicUnicorn/ReleaseNotes/Lubuntu

Xubuntu 14.10:

Xubuntu 14.10 features new Xfce Power Manager plugin in panel and ittems in the newly themed alt-tab dialog can now be clicked with the mouse.

See: wiki.ubuntu.com/UtopicUnicorn/ReleaseNotes/Xubuntu.

Other Flavors:

Ubuntu Gnome 14.10: wiki.ubuntu.com/UtopicUnicorn/ReleaseNotes/UbuntuGNOME

UbuntuKylin 14.10: wiki.ubuntu.com/UtopicUnicorn/ReleaseNotes/UbuntuKylin

UbuntuStudio 14.10: wiki.ubuntu.com/UtopicUnicorn/ReleaseNotes/UbuntuStudio

rabbitVCS

Quick tutorial shows how to install RabbitVCS, easy version control for Linux, in Ubuntu 14.04/Ubuntu 14.10 for Nautilus, Gedit, Thunar, Nem

RabbitVCS is a graphical front-end for version control systems available on Linux. It integrates into file managers to provide file context menu access to version control repositories. The project was originally called NautilusSvn, but due to the desire to support file managers in addition to Nautilus and more version control systems, it was renamed to RabbitVCS.

RabbitVCS extension for Nautilus

Install RabbitVCS in Ubuntu:

While Ubuntu repositories provide an old version of RabbitVCS, the latest release is always available in its official PPA.

1. To add the PPA, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal, paste the command below and hit enter to run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rabbitvcs/ppa

Type in your user password when it asks and there is no visual feed back.

2. After that, install RabbitVCS extension via Synaptic Package Manager (install it from Ubuntu Software Center), and receive future updates by running running regular updates via Software Updater.

  1. Install and then launch Synaptic from the Unity Dash or App Menu.
  2. Click the Reload button to update package lists.
  3. Search rabbitvcs
  4. Highlight rabbitvcs-nautilus3, rabbitvcs-gedit, or rabbitvcs-thunar
  5. and mark for installation.

  6. Finally click the Apply button to install it/them.

Install RabbitVCS from PPA

Once installed, log out and back in.

Install RabbitVCS extension for Nemo:

For Linux Mint Nemo file manager, you can install the extension by running the commands below one by one in terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tsvetko.tsvetkov/cinnamon

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install nemo-rabbitvcs

Supports for Linux Mint 17 and 13.

Emacs 24.4 in Ubuntu 14.04

NOTE: This post is outdated. Please read this new tutorial about compiling GNU Emacs from the source.

GNU Emacs has finally reached version 24.4 with many new features and improvements. The most notable is that the text editor brings a built-in web browser.

GNU Emacs is the most popular and most ported Emacs text editor, and it was created by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project.

The latest release Emacs 24.4 was released a few hours ago. The new release features:

  • A built-in web browser (M-x eww)
  • Improved multi-monitor and fullscreen support
  • “Electric” indentation is enabled by default
  • Support for saving and restoring the state of frames and windows
  • Emacs Lisp packages can now be digitally signed
  • A new “advice” mechanism for Emacs Lisp
  • File notification support
  • Pixel-based resizing for frames and windows
  • Support for menus in text terminals
  • A new rectangular mark mode (C-x SPC)

Emacs 24.4 in Ubuntu 14.04

How to Install Emacs 24.4 in Ubuntu:

At the moment of writing this tutorial, there’s no PPA repository that contains Emacs 24.4. Fortunately, it’s not hard to build it from the source tarball. I’ve done it successfully in 64-bit Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Below steps will show you how:

1. If have the old Emacs 24.3 installed, you may first remove it from Ubuntu Software Center so that you can install the new version over it.

2. Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal, or open it from the Unity Dash.

Open Terminal to run commands

3. Run command below to install the build-essential:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

4. Install the required dependencies:

sudo apt-get build-dep emacs

While the installing process, you’ll be asked to configure the Postfix.

5. Now download Emacs 24.4 from its official FTP download page.

Emacs FTP download Page

6. Extract the source and go into the result folder in terminal:

cd ~/Downloads && tar -xf emacs-24.4.tar.* && cd emacs-24.4

7. Finally compile the package by running commands below one by one.

./configure

make

sudo make install

Once done, you should be able to launch Emacs by running emacs or emacs-24.4 in terminal and lock the shortcut to the Unity Launcher.

To create a launcher for Emacs 24.4. Thanks to Emad Khoury, run command to create a .desktop file and edit it with Gedit text editor:

sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/Emacs-24.desktop

When the file opens, paste below into it and save the file.

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Emacs-24
Exec=env UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 /usr/local/bin/emacs
Terminal=false
Icon=emacs
Type=Application
Categories=IDE
X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=NewWindow
[NewWindow Shortcut Group]
Name=New Window
TargetEnvironment=Unity

Depends on where you install Emacs 24, you may replace the value of Exec and Icon to the path to executable and shortcut icon file.

Audacious Audio Player

Audacious, the default audio player in Lubuntu, has just reached version 3.5.2 with updated translations and a few bug fixes.

Audacious is a free and open source audio player with a focus on low resource usage, high audio quality, and support for a wide range of audio formats. It contains built-in gapless playback and supports plugins and Winamp 2 skins.

Audacious GTK interface

Audacious GTK interface

Audacious Winamp Skin

Audacious Winamp Skin

Audacious 3.5.2 is the final release in 3.5 series. The developers are now working hard on Audacious 3.6. Bug fixes in v3.5.2:

  • Problem with single instance in Windows #457
  • build fails if faad headers are missing #458
  • When adding a SID file with multiple subtunes to playlist, only the first subtune is added. #462

Install / Upgrade Audacious in (L)Ubuntu:

Thanks to Web Upd8 Team, the binary packages have been made into PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 and their derivatives.

To add the PPA and install Audacious, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run commands below one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install audacious audacious-plugins

Install Audacious in Ubuntu From PPA

How to Install Minecraft in Ubuntu 14.10

Last updated: October 18, 2014

minecraft ubuntu 14.10

Installing Minecraft in Ubuntu is quite easy. All we need to do is install Java, download and run the .jar executable from its official website.

1.) To get better game experience, you may first install graphics driver for your video card:

  • For Intel graphics, you’re good to go with the default open-source driver.
  • For NVIDIA or AMD graphics, it’s better to use a proprietary video driver. Open Additional Drivers utility from the Unity Dash, select the NVIDIA or AMD driver from the list and install it.

2.) For Java, you can either install OpenJDK Java 7 from Ubuntu Software Center or install Oracle Java from PPA.

To install OpenJDK Java 7, click the button below to bring up Ubuntu Software Center and click the install button.

Click to Install OpenJDK 7

To install Oracle Java, see this post or just run commands below one by one in terminal:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:webupd8team/java

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

3.) Once Java Runtime is installed, download the Minecraft.jar file from:

Minecraft Download Page

4.) Make the Minecraft.jar file executable.

To do so, right-click on the file in Nautilus browser and go to its Properties windows -> Permissions tab and finally check the box where it says “Allow executing file as program”.

Make Minecraft.jar executable

5.) Finally start the Minecraft Launcher:

MineCraft Launcher

When the launcher opens, log-in with your account and click the Play button. After downloading required packages, you’re finally able to play the game:

Minecraft in Ubuntu 14.10

ubuntu desktop shortcuts

This quick tutorial shows you how to easily create applications shortcut icons on your Ubuntu’s default Unity Desktop.

Due to permission issue, it’s not possible to drag and drop application shortcuts from the Unity Dash to the Desktop. You will get below error dialog when trying to do so:

Drop desktop shortcut fail

As a workaround we can directly copy and paste the application shortcuts from /usr/share/applications directory into desktop.

1.) Open “Files”, Nautilus file browser, from the left Launcher and navigate to Computer (left panel) / usr / share / applications.

You will see all the applications’ icons there.

Desktop Shortcuts

2.) Select one or more icons and press Ctrl+C to copy it/them. Then click on blank area of your desktop and press Ctrl+V to paste the icon(s). Note that drop and drop won’t work

That’s it, just so easy!

3.) For those who want to place Home, Network, Trash, and Devices icons on desktop, open Unity Tweak Tool (available in Ubuntu Software Center) from the Unity Dash and enable them from Desktop Icons utility.

desktop-shortcuts-1

Tor Browser Ubuntu

Tor Browser 4.0 has been released recently with important security updates to Firefox and SSLv3 disabled due to the POODLE attack.

The first release of the 4.0 series is available from the Tor Browser Project page and also from our distribution directory.

This release features important security updates to Firefox. Additionally, due to the POODLE attack, we have also disabled SSLv3 in this release.

The primary user-facing change since the 3.6 series is the transition to Firefox 31-ESR.

More importantly for censored users who were using 3.6, the 4.0 series also features the addition of three versions of the meek pluggable transport.

via the official announcement

Tor Browser 4.0 in ubuntu

Thanks to Web Upd8 Team, the binary packages have been made into PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 and their derivatives.

To install Tor Browser, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal. When it opens, run the commands below one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:webupd8team/tor-browser 

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install tor-browser

If you don’t want to add the PPA, grab the .deb installer directly from the Launchpad page.

Install Tor Browser from PPA

Once installed, open Tor Browser from Unity Dash or menu and enjoy!