UbuntuHandbook

UVC Webcam/Camera Software Guvcview 2.1.0 Released (Ubuntu PPA)

Last updated: January 23, 2024 — Leave a comment

Guvcview, the free open-source tool for capturing image/video and dynamically controlling UVC camera and webcam devices, released version 2.1.0.

It’s a GTK3 and Qt5 application that provides both graphical interface and command line options to control your webcam or camera.

With it, you can change the brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, white balance (gamma), sharpness, backlight compensation, etc settings for your webcam.

Besides the dynamic control of UVC (USB Video Class) camera/webcam, it also allows to capture video with control of frame rate, filters such as mirror, invert, pieces, blur, etc. Also, capture audio with sample rate, latency, and filters including echo, reverb, fuzz, wahwah, and ducky.

In Howtos, News camera, webcam

How to Install Enlightenment 0.26.0 (E26) in Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04

Last updated: January 21, 2024 — 1 Comment

This simple tutorial shows how to install the last Enlightenment desktop 0.26.0 in Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 23.10 via PPA.

Enlightenment announced 0.26.0 release almost a month ago. There’s however no easy way to install it in Ubuntu, besides building from the source.

To make life easier, I’ve built the package into this unofficial PPA. So, you can easily try it out in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and/or Ubuntu 23.10.

Changes in Enlightenment 0.26.0 include:

Add DDC option to backlight settings (for external monitor)
Bigger task previews
Add watermark to wl mode
Support new eet disk sync API to ensure config it stored
Support action desktop files in EFM to add file actions
Add org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver inhibit support
See the official release note for more.

In Howtos Enlightenment

Collector – New Alternative to macOS Dropover for Linux

Last updated: January 20, 2024 — Leave a comment

Looking for an alternative to macOS Dropover utility? Collector is the one for Linux Desktop!

It’s a free and open-source tool to make drag & drop easier. Without having to open side-by-side windows, just paste or drag whatever content into the small app window, stash, gather, and then move all items to destination at once.

This is useful if you have many files to move, but they are saved in different locations. Just drag’n’drop them into Collector, then preview and/or edit them, finally drag’n’drop to destination folder at once.

In App Review collector, dropover

Wine 9.0 Stable Released! How to Install it in Ubuntu

Last updated: February 11, 2024 — 2 Comments

Wine, the popular software for running Windows applications on Linux, macOS, & BSD, announced new stable 9.0 release few days ago on Tuesday.

Wine 9.0 features WoW 6.0 (Windows 32-bit on Windows 64-bit), which was experimentally supported in last 8.0 release. It allows to run 32-bit Windows applications on a purely 64-bit Unix installation, instead of inside a 32-bit Unix process. However, the features is NOT enabled by default.

The release also includes experimental Wayland graphics driver. Which is also not enabled by default, but already implements many features, such as basic window management, multiple monitors, high-DPI scaling, relative motion events, and Vulkan support.

The 9.0 release added initial support for building Wine for the ARM64EC architecture, for running Windows apps on ARM64 powered devices with native speed.

Other changes in Wine 9.0 include:

WinRT theming supports a dark theme option
Vulkan driver supports up to version 1.3.272 of the Vulkan spec.
Implement Windows Media Video (WMV) decoder DirectX Media Object (DMO)
Mono engine is updated to version 8.1.0
DLS1 and DLS2 sound font loading
The default Windows version for new prefixes is set to Windows 10.
MIDI playback in dmsynth
Indeo IV50 Video for Windows decoder
And much more! See release note for details.

In News wine

VirtualBox 7.0.14 Released with Initial RHEL 9.4 Support

Last updated: January 19, 2024 — Leave a comment

Oracle Virtualbox announced a new point release for the 7.0 series this Tuesday.

It’s VirtualBox 7.0.14, which add initial host and guest support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4, though it’s still in development stage. As well, there’s a kernel panic fix for RHEL 8.9 running as guest OS.

For Solaris Linux, the guest additions can be installed into an alternate root path, and it no longer requires to reboot after uninstalling guest additions.

For macOS as host, the release added support for newer USB storage devices, and fixed memory Leak in the VBoxIntNetSwitch process when VM was configured to use ‘Internal Networking’.

The release also include OVF import/export improvements. They include import & export virtual machines containing NVMe storage controllers, and, export a VM which contains a medium inserted into a virtual CD/DVD drive which is attached to a Virtio-SCSI controller.

In News Virtualbox

Install XIVLauncher (Custom FFXIV Launcher) in Ubuntu 24.04, 22.04

Last updated: January 18, 2024 — Leave a comment

Play Final Fantasy XIV Online in Linux? There’s a custom launcher for the game for better experience!

It’s XIVLauncher, a free and open-source launcher that provides a customized WINE version for perfect compatibility with FFXIV.

Since the original launcher is slow and cannot save your password, XIVLauncher provides a faster experience, better Linux integration, as well as following QoL features:

Auto-login
Fast patching
Discord Rich Presence
Fast in-game market board price checks
Chat filtering
Chat bridge to Discord
Discord notifications for duties, retainer sales, etc.

In Howtos Final Fantasy XIV Online, game

Yuki-iptv – An IPTV player with EPG support (Ubuntu PPA)

Last updated: January 23, 2025 — 3 Comments

Linux is getting more IPTV player applications in recent years. Here I’m going to introduce yuki-iptv, a new one with EPG support.

Personally, I prefer hypnotix which is developed by Linux Mint team, since it has a large list of built-in TV channels. But if you want more features, then yuki-iptv is a good choice to try out.

The IPTV player does NOT provide any content or TV channels. User has to manually add M3u / M3u8 / XSPF playlists (see github.com/iptv-org/iptv) and/or TV guide address via config dialog.

Yuki-iptv add playlist

Besides basic M3u / M3u8 / XSPF playlists support, the app also support viewing unencrypted streams UDP (multicast), HTTP, HLS (M3u8), XTream API, as well as TV program (EPG) support in XMLTV and JTV formats.

In App Review IPTV

How to Install VBA-M to Play GBA/GBC Games in Ubuntu

Last updated: January 17, 2024 — Leave a comment

Got GameBoy, GameBoy Advance, or GameBoy Color ROMs? It’s easy to play them in your Linux PC through VBA-M emulator.

There are quite a few game emulators for Linux. You can use PPSSPP to run PSP games, and RetroArch for multiple consoles support. For Nintendo Game Boy and Game Boy Advance, VBA-M is a good choice.

VBA-M, stands for VisualBoyAdvance-M, is the continued development of the now inactive VisualBoy Advance project, with many improvements from various forks.

It’s a free open-source emulator app that included in system repositories for many Linux, including Fedora, Arch, Manjaro, and so forth.

In Howtos game

MenuLibre – Advanced tool to Edit App Shortcuts in Start Menu

Last updated: October 12, 2024 — Leave a comment

Need a tool to edit your apps in the start menu, main menu, or Gnome overview search results? Try MenuLibre!

In most Linux, all app icons you see in start menu, dock launcher, and the desktop, are handled by .desktop config files. By editing the file, you can change the app icon, name, hide the app, add right-click menu option, and choose which file types to be associated with.

I’m written about how to configure .desktop file using a single command.

For graphical ways, there are quite a few apps to do the job, and here are 3 of them:

Arronax – well known, but seems not being updated. Though, it’s still working.
AppEditor – Elementary OS style tool to edit desktop menu entries. However, lacks pre-build packages.
MenuLibre – the one I’m going to introduce in this tutorial.

MenuLibre is an advanced tool written in Python and GTK3 toolkit. With it, user can get started by either searching or browsing in left to select app to edit, or click “+” in top left to create new menu entry for your app.

In App Review, Howtos Edit Application Menu

How to Disable Recent Files in Ubuntu 24.04 | 22.04

Last updated: January 16, 2024 — 1 Comment

This simple tutorial shows how to disable (or auto-delete) “recent” files tab in left side-bar of file manager in Ubuntu 24.04 & 22.04.

GNOME Files, aka Nautilus file manager, has a “Recent” tab in left side-bar, which include all the recent opened photos, videos, and documents.

It’s useful for user or applications to quickly re-open recent edited files. However, when working at a public place, it can be better to disable this feature since it may contain sensitive data.