UbuntuHandbook

GNOME 46 Alpha is out! Better Remote Desktop & Flatpak Support

Last updated: January 14, 2024 — Leave a comment

GNOME announced the first alpha of the next 46 release few days ago on last Friday.

Let’s see what’s new in the desktop for next Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

First of all, every Gnome release has a new default wallpaper. This time, it’s a blue background embrace the rounded triangle. And, in this release GNOME backgrounds now favors JPEG-XL as a format. I don’t have any photo images in .jxl format. But it seems that Gnome now supports for setting the file format as background wallpaper.

Gnome 46

GNOME Remote Desktop now supports headless remote login via GDM, through for RDP only. And, a systemd service is introduced for single user headless setups. As well, Gnome-Control-Center and classic session are allowing to run in headless mode.

In News Gnome

GNOME Has New System Load (CPU, RAM, etc) Indicator on Top Bar

Last updated: September 2, 2024 — Leave a comment

Don’t remember how many tools, I’ve written about, for monitoring CPU, RAM, Network, and other system resources usage in Ubuntu. But, there’s a brand-new for GNOME, the default desktop environment.

It’s Astra Monitor, a free open-source tool provides highly customizable interface on Gnome top-panel, to monitor CPU, GPU, RAM memory, disk storage, network usage, as well as hardware temperature, voltage, and fan speed.

It supports displaying the data in real-time bar, history graph, percentage number, with user selected order, in left, center, or right corner of panel.

Aster Monitor on GNOME Panel

Besides having quick glance at system resource usage, user can also click on the indicator icon to pop-up a rich drop-down menu with detailed information. By moving cursor over the menu can also display even more about the hardware, resource load, processes, and so forth.
Continue Reading…

In App Review Gnome, system monitor

Linux Mint 21.3 Released! Cinnamon 6.0 & Initial Wayland Support

Last updated: January 13, 2024 — Leave a comment

Linux Mint announced new 21.3 release, code-name “Virginia”, this Friday.

It’s the 3rd update for the Mint 21 release series, which is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and uses Kernel 5.15 LTS.

The new Linux Mint 21.3 features Cinnamon Desktop 6.0, with experimental Wayland support. Which, has been default in Ubuntu (since 22.04), Fedora Workstation, and other Linux with recent Gnome. However, there are still many applications do NOT work on wayland.

Mint Wayland session

The new desktop also features a new “Actions” page in System Settings. Like Applets, Extensions, and Desklets, it allows to add context menu (right-click menu) options to file browser & desktop, by downloading add-ons from the official cinnamon spices.
Continue Reading…

In News Linux Mint

Disable Turbo Boost / Set Constant CPU Speed in Ubuntu 22.04/24.04

Last updated: January 13, 2024 — Leave a comment

This tutorial shows how to turn off CPU turbo boost, and/or set constant maximum (or minimum) CPU speed in Ubuntu 22.04 and/or Ubuntu 24.04.

Disable turbo boost will limit your CPU speed to prevent running over the base frequency. It’s useful to save power and prevent your computer from overheating. For choice, user can also set constant CPU speed for either minimum power consumption or maximum performance.

Most machine today has option in the BIOS page to enable/disable and even change CPU frequency, however, it’s not flexible.

For Linux, the Kernel has a tool called cpupower can do the job from command line, and user can turn on/off turbo boost through sysfs. Gnome Desktop even has a GRAPHICAL extension (scroll-down to see step 4) to make things easier.

In Howtos power

Install Nicotine+ for Soulseek P2P Network in Ubuntu 24.04 | 22.04

Last updated: May 5, 2024 — Leave a comment

This simple tutorial shows how to install Nicotine plus, the graphical client for the Soulseek peer-to-peer network, in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and Ubuntu 24.04.

Soulseek is an ad-free, spyware free, and plain free file sharing network, make it easy for you to find people with similar interests, and make new discoveries!

And, Nicotine is a lightweight, pleasant, free and open source (FOSS) alternative to the official Soulseek client, while also providing a comprehensive set of features.

The app used to be available in Ubuntu system repository, but removed due to lack of development. It’s later revived and finally added back to Ubuntu 24.04 repository.

For current Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and even Ubuntu 18.04, user can install it from the official PPA.

Nicotine in Ubuntu 22.04

In Howtos network, nicotine, soulseek

Kodi 20.3 Released as Last Update for the “Nexus” series

Last updated: January 11, 2024 — Leave a comment

Kodi, formerly XBMC media center, released version 20.3 this Wednesday!

According to the announcements, this is the last release of the 20.x “Nexus” series. While Kodi 21 “Omega” now is in Beta 2 stage.

The release mainly includes bug-fixes and some backports. They include an assortment of fixes for Estuary, including home categories’ focus position, alignment of counter labels and Shift view for collections.

For gaming, the release fixed controllers not assigned to game ports correctly on Android, blue/pink washed out colours on Windows with 10-bit displays, and possible crash in Port dialogue box.

For Linux, it includes fixes for VP9 Profile 2 playback failure, and a leak of EGLFences in the DRM Prime renderer.
Continue Reading…

In News Kodi, XBMC media center

How to Install VSCodium IDE in Ubuntu 22.04 & 24.04 [4 Ways]

Last updated: January 10, 2024 — Leave a comment

This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to install VS-Codium IDE in Ubuntu, using 4 different ways.

VSCodium is a free and open-source software binaries of VS Code. It’s NOT a fork, but a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VS Code.

The VSCodium project was born due to:

Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking.

It’s a good choice as a telemetry-less version of VS Code without rebuilding by programmers themselves.

Codium in Ubuntu

In Howtos IDE, Visual Studio Code

Install Latest libheif 1.19.5 in Ubuntu 24.04 | 22.04

Last updated: January 23, 2025 — 5 Comments

This simple tutorial shows how to install the latest version of libheif library, for better HEIF and AVIF image formats support, in Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04 and/or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Libheif is a popular free open-source library for encoding and decoding HEIF and AVIF. Which, also has partial support for JPEG-in-HEIF, JPEG2000, uncompressed (ISO/IEC 23001-17:2023) capabilities.

It supports libde265 and/or ffmpeg for decoding HEIC images, and x265/kvazaar for encoding. For AVIF images, it uses either AOM/dav1d for decoding, and AOM/rav1e/svt-av1 for encoding support.

As well, it has command line tools to convert HEIF/HEIC to other images, and convert images to HEIF/HEIC.

Many popular applications, including GIMP, Darktable, ImageMagick, Krita, and gThumb, use libheif for HEIF and/or AVIF support. And, the library is usually installed as dependency along with them.

gThumb use libheif for AVIF support

In Howtos HEIF, photo

Chromium to Allow VA-API Hardware Decoding in Linux Wayland

Last updated: January 8, 2024 — Leave a comment

For Chromium user, the popular web browser is finally to allow VA-API hardware decoding for video playback in Linux Wayland.

Chromium so far does NOT officially support VA-API Video Acceleration API on Linux. However, there are experimental flags to enable this feature, which might work on certain configurations, but without guarantees (See the official Docs).

This experimental feature however does not work in Linux with Wayland session. Meaning the most recent Ubuntu, Fedora, & other Linux with GNOME Desktop.

Just few days ago on Saturday, Chromium source merged the request to “allowing VA-API on Linux Ozone/Wayland“, submitted by JianHui J Dai.

VaapiWrapper has been updated to remove the usage of libva-x11 and the legacy VaapiVideoDecodeAccelerator, in favor of libva-drm only. This means now Linux Ozone/Wayland can share the same code path as Linux Ozone/X11. See CL:4938496.

This CL removes the remaining libva-x11 codes from Ozone and VaapiWrapper, and allows VA-API by default on Linux Ozone/Wayland.

In News chromium browser, web

Linux 6.7 Released with Many New Hardware Support (Kernel PPA)

Last updated: January 8, 2024 — Leave a comment

Linux Kernel 6.7 is finally released! Linus Torvalds announced the release on Sunday night:

So we had a little bit more going on last week compared to the holiday week before that, but certainly not enough to make me think we’d want
to delay this any further.

End result: 6.7 is (in number of commits: over 17k non-merge commits, with 1k+ merges) one of the largest kernel releases we’ve ever had, but the extra rc8 week was purely due to timing with the holidays, not about any difficulties with the larger release.

The new Kernel release has many new and improved hardware support!

For Intel, the Turbostat command utility now supports Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake (15th gen) processors; LPSS (Low-Power Sub-System) driver now support Lunar Lake M processors; The Meteor Lake (14th gen mobile processors) graphics support now considered stable.

All the newest AMD Radeon RDNA2 and RDNA3 GPUs with Display Core Next 3.0 has Seamless Boot enabled.

And, NVIDIA has GSP support in the open-source Nouveau driver for initial GeForce RTX 40 acceleration support and improved RTX 20/30 series hardware support.

In News kernel, linux