The free and open-source FrostWire BitTorrent client has released 5.6.5, it fixed a real nasty bug that will affect many of you who like to select multiple files from the same set of search results when those files happen to belong to the same torrent.
It also updated the SoundCloud meta search and integrated fully to the new SoundCloud.com’s search interface.
If you are a musician and you have a SoundCloud account, remember that if you mark your songs as “Downloadable” they will become available to the millions of FrostWire users worldwide, both on desktop and mobile.
Changelog:
frostwire (5.6.5) stable; urgency=high
Upgrades Soundcloud search, download, streaming.
Fixes issue when starting downloads made of multiple single files
that belong to the same .torrent.
When opening finished transfers on the library with a double click
FrostWire will no longer type the name of the file on the library
search box.
It’s highly recommended to upgrade to FrostWire 5.6.5, here’s the link for Ubuntu and Linux Mint package:
VideoLAN and the VLC development team are glad to present the new major version of VLC, 2.1.0, named RinceWind
With a new audio core, hardware decoding and encoding, port to mobile platforms, preparation for Ultra-HD video and a special care to support more formats, 2.1 is a major upgrade for VLC.
Rincewind has a new rendering pipeline for audio, with better effiency, volume and device management, to improve VLC audio support.
It supports many new devices inputs, formats, metadata and improves most of the current ones, preparing for the next-gen codecs.
Rincewind fixes around a thousand bugs, in more than 7000 commits from 140 volunteers..
At the moment of writting this tutorial, the release note is still 404 page. I’ll add the link once it’s OK.
Features:
AUDIO:
Rewritten audio core, allowing better volume and device management.
Rewrite of the audio modules, to adapt to the new core.
Correct support for multi-channel layouts in all formats: 5.1, 6.1 and 7.1
New audio outputs for Windows Vista, Android, iOS, OpenBSD and OSSv4.
New remapping, gain, stereo widening, downmixing effects.
Higher samplerate, precision, live configuration in the core.
Numerous new audio metadata format supported.
VLC new audio core
VEDIO:
Port the OpenGL output to OpenGL ES.
Support color conversion shaders in glsl on Android and iOS.
New outputs for OpenMax IL on mobile and Decklink Blackmagic.
New video outputs for iOS using OpenGL ES2.
Support for deinterlacing for higher bit depth and XYZ colorspace.
New anaglyph filter for side-by-side 3D.
4K-ready :)
CODECS:
Add hardware decoding for OS X using VDADecoder.
Add hardware decoding for Android using MediaCodec.
Add hardware decoding for GNU/Linux using VDPAU.
Add hardware encoding for Windows using Intel QuickSyncVideo.
Support for G2M4, MSS1, MSS2, TSCC2, CDXL, Ut, VBLE video codecs.
Support for Ulead DV audio, Indeo Audio Coder, RealAudio Lossless audio.
Support for SCTE-27 and complete EIA-608 subtitles
faster video decoding
FORMATS:
Support for fragmented MP4, Wave/RF64 files.
Extended metadata tags and cover art support in Ogg, AVI, MP4 and MKV.
Support FLAC, Atrac, ADPCM, DV Type 1, 12bits DV audio in AVI.
Extended support for AVI, MKV and MJPEG streams.
Better recording of AVI and MKV format.
Audio fingerprinting using AcoustID.
INPUT AND DEVICES:
Support for screen input on OSX Lion and later.
Support for Microsoft Smooth Streaming, developed by Viotech.net
New RTMP input module, using libavformat!
Support for VNC/rfb and Remote Desktop view-only modes.
Important improvements on Blu-Ray, Dash, v4l2 and HTTP inputs.
New AVFoundation OS X and shm framebuffer inputs.
FOR ANIME FANS:
New 6.1 downmixer to 5.1 and Stereo from MKV/Flac 6.1.
Correct YUV->RGB color matrix in the OpenGL shaders.
Improved MKV support for seeking, and resiliancy.
Editions support in MKV.
Better subtitles and metadata support from MKV.
Various ASS subtitles improvements.
FOR MOBILE:
Port to Android, from 2.1 to 4.3, on ARMv6, ARMv7, x86 and MIPS.
New port to iOS, from iOS 5 to 7, on all iPads and iPhones after 3GS.
Partial port to WinRT, for Windows 8, 8.1 and WP8.
OpenGL ES optimized outputs.
Improvements of OpenMAX IL decoders, encoders and renderers.
New audio, video outputs and interfaces for mobiles.
VLC on mobile
FOR DEVELOPERS:
libVLC and most modules are now LGPLv2.1+.
libVLC media framework can now be used in all types of applications.
libVLC SDK packages now exists, in addition to more examples.
Improved libVLC API, for better control.
VLC’s web plugins now support windowless mode, for smoother integration with HTML elements.
Want to make screencasts as animated GIFs on Ubuntu? Well, byzanz is the best choice I ever found.
Byzanz is a small and efficient screencast creator. It records your desktop session or parts of it to an animated GIF, OGG Theora or Flash.
Below is an animated GIF created by byzanz:
It is said that byzanz does not screencast Unity-3D. However, I’ve been using it in Unity for a period of time since I was in Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal.
To install byzanz in Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 12.10, press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run below commands one by one:
Cover Art Browser is a plugin gives a visually slick way to browse your music collection in Rhythmbox v2.96-v3.0.
It adds a new CoverArt button to the left pane; Albums are displayed as clickable buttons containing their album cover; Right click menu allows to play, queue & search for coverart for an album.
As well as simply displaying a grid full of album art for browsing, you can:
Drag & Drop cover art on to the browser
Fetch/search for missing album art
Display Album & Artist name under the cover
Double click playing of albums
Sort covers by album name and artist
Adjust cover art size
Multiple user-configurable options to tailor what you see and use.
Examine and change properties for an album/tracks
Set ‘CoverArt Browser’ to Rhythmbox’s default view
To install this plugin, press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run below commands one by one:
As you may know, Task Coach is a free flexible open source todo manager featuring hierarchical tasks. It grew out of frustration about other programs not handling composite tasks well. In addition to flexible composite tasks, Task Coach has grown to include prerequisites, prioritizing, effort tracking, category tags, budgets, notes, and many other features. However, users are not forced to use all these features; Task Coach can be as simple or complex as you need it to be.
Task Coach has reached 1.3.32 with lots of bug fixes. It has been added to Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy’s universe repository, so it can be easily installed via Ubuntu Software Center.
For Ubuntu 13.04 Raring and earlier version, deb package can be download at sourceforge.net
Gtk-gnutella is the graphical Unix Gnutella client, efficient, reliable and fast, written in C. It has been optimized for speed and scalability, with low-memory consumption. It is meant to be left running 24×7, using little CPU and only the configured bandwidth.
Gtk-gnutella 1.0.0 is a major release correcting a few bugs and adding small but interesting features such as the ability to limit dropping of received UDP messages, making the DHT keys and values persistent across sessions, SDBM file auto-compaction at startup, and last but not least, rarest-chunk downloading to optimize download efficiency when facing partial sources.
New Feature:
Let users define a maximum lease time for UPnP and NAT-PMP mappings.
Made DHT keys and values persistent across sessions.
When there are partial sources for a file, download the rarest chunks first.
Improvements:
[GTK1] Optimize massive updating of the download source list.
[GTK] Dynamically update the list of available chunks in the file (blue line).
Files used to persist information across sessions are now auto-compacted.
The UPnP layer can now monitor more types of Internet Gateway Devices.
After unclean shutdown, rename existing core file in crash directory.
Detect servers that choke when receiving pipelined HTTP requests.
Added the Mersenne Twister Pseudo-Random Number Generator.
Remember when user requests an auto-restart, to keep the same session going.
Increased maximum download buffer size to 1 MiB and default to 128 KiB.
Install gtk-gnutella 1.0.0 via PPA:
The Sourceforge provides the Deb packages for gtk-gnutella, but I can’t install it on my machine due to dependency problem. Fortunately there’s a PPA repository makes it easy to install it in Ubuntu and its derivatives.
To get started, press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run below command to add the ppa:
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:zapman/gtkg
Then update package lists and install the package via:
This tutorial shows you how to easily kill / force quit an application or window that freezes or stops responding using xkill & shortcut key.
Xkill is a utility for forcing the X server to close connections to clients. This program is very dangerous, but is useful for aborting programs that have displayed undesired windows on a user’s screen. It works on Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, and other Linux systems.
You can run Xkill from terminal, Alt+F2 run command box or even via a keyboard shortcut. When it runs, your cursor becomes a cross (‘X’). Click on any window will kill it instantly.
Warning: Don’t click on Desktop and Panel when running xkill, it will also kill them and break your desktop and you need to restart to restore.
To create a shortcut key for xkill, go to System Settings -> Keyboard -> Shortcut -> Custom shortcuts. Click add to create the shortcut and give a key combination.
After that, press the key combination and then click on the window you want to kill.
Qmplay2 is a Qt-based Media Video Player for Ubuntu Linux and Windows. It plays all formats and stream supported by ffmpeg and libmodplug (including J2B). It has integrated Youtube browser.
This simple and brief tutorial is going to show you how to install Qmplay2 in Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy, Ubuntu 13.04 Raring, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise, Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal, Linux Mint and Elementary OS via the PPA repository
To get started, press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run below command to add the PPA:
This tutorial is going to show you a simple and stylish Facebook browser for your PC. This app provides native Facebook experience in a Facebook styled window plus a system tray icon for providing notifications. This app doesn’t disturbs you by popping out notifications, but it notifies you silently by changing the system tray icon color.
This app uses a simple approach for delivering notifications in the system tray. It reads the number of notifications, messages and friend requests directly from the facebook page, using Javascript calls, without using any components from Facebook SDK.
Install Facebook Desktop App:
This app works on Windows, Mac and Ubuntu (64-bit only). I’ve tested on Ubuntu 13.04 Raring, unfortunately the indicator applet didn’t work for Unity Desktop.
Download the Deb:
For Windows & Mac user, download it from qt-apps.org