News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
Folicate, the modern ebook reader, released version 3.1.0 with new features support.
It’s a free open-source reader written in JavaScript, and uses GTK4 plus LibAdwaita for its modern user interface, that works in most Linux Desktop and mobile devices such as PinePhone.
Folicate can open local ebook in EPUB, Mobipocket, Kindle, FB2, CBZ, and PDF file formats. It supports online digital libraries such as Feedbooks, Internet Archive, Manybook, Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, unglue.it.
Lossless Cut, the popular free open-source video cutting/trimming tool, updated recently with full-screen support.
There are a few tools to cut out a fragment of a video in Linux, besides using heavy video editor application (e.g., Kdenlive and OpenShot). They include Video Trimmer, VidCutter.
However, Lossless Cut is my top favorite one! It lets you quickly extract the good parts from your videos and discard many gigabytes of data. It’s extremely fast because it does almost direct data copy instead of re-encoding with the power of FFmpeg library.
This simple tutorial shows how to install and setup SABnzbd, Usenet download tool, in Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04.
SABnzbd is a free open-source program to download binary files from Usenet servers. Many people upload all sorts of interesting material to Usenet and you need a special program to get this material with the least effort.
The app makes Usenet as simple and streamlined as possible by automating everything. All you have to do is add an .nzb. SABnzbd takes over from there, where it will be automatically downloaded, verified, repaired, extracted and filed away with zero human interaction.
This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to install Telegram instant messaging app in Ubuntu 22.04 & Ubuntu 24.04.
The popular Telegram Messenger is available in most platforms. For Linux, it available as official tarball, universal Flatpak ans Snap packages. And, Ubuntu has third-party repositories to make it easy to keep updated.
So, as far as I know there are 4 ways to install the app in Ubuntu Linux. Choose any one that you prefer.
Telegram Desktop (image from flathub.org)
For Ubuntu 22.04/23.10, Fedora & other Linux with Wayland, Shutter screenshot tool can finally take screenshots for selected area and app windows!
Shutter is (or was) an excellent feature rich screenshot tool, with image editing and uploading support.
It was one of my top favorite apps, but removed from Ubuntu repositories due to lack of maintenance. Though, it’s later added back to system repository, thanks to open-source community’s work by porting it to GTK3.
Scribus, the popular free open-source desktop publishing software, announced the new stable 1.6.x release series on the first day of 2024!
It’s been more than 4 years since the last stable 1.4.8, while 1.5.x release series is available as development branch.
The new Scribus 1.6 includes many new features! If you have the default 1.5.8 dev package from Ubuntu system repository, then most of them are already in use.
Features include:
This simple tutorial shows how to install the most recent xxHash for faster hash checking in Ubuntu Linux.
xxHash is extremely fast non-cryptographic hash algorithm, working at RAM speed limit. It can be useful to check integrity for large amounts of data, index data, and/or used in cryptographic applications like digital signatures.
The library includes the following algorithms:
I’m new to hash algorithm, but doing hash check regularly when trying out different Linux distributions. And I use sha256, since the most sites provide sha256sum files for the hash code of their disco images.
This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to install VS Code IDE and keep it up-to-date in Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 23.04, Ubuntu 24.04 using 3 different ways.
Microsoft provides official code packages for Linux through native .deb (for Debian/Ubuntu), .rpm (for Fedora/SUSE), and universal Snap package run in sandbox.
For choice, there’s also a community maintained Flatpak package which also runs in sandbox.
So, there are 3 common ways to install this IDE in your Ubuntu Desktop!
Gnome Files, aka the default Nautilus file manager in Ubuntu & Fedora workstation, keeps moving with new features!
In the passed few month, there are minor but beginner friendly features merged into this popular file manager. They include “Enter Location” menu option, sidebar toggle button in sidebar, and badge icon to folder icon in ‘properties’ dialog.
NOTE: The new features introduced in this post are merged to master branch but NOT released yet! They may be available in next GNOME versions, backport to current, or even removed!
Alacritty, the popular free open-source GPU-accelerated terminal emulator, release new major 0.13.0 version few days ago.
The release introduced new features, including persist config option in hints config section, warnings for unused configuration file options, support for keybindings with dead keys, dynamically loading conpty.dll on Windows, as well as:
Back/Forward mouse buttons support in bindings-w -1) for new windowsprefer_egl to prioritize EGL over other display APIswindow.blur config option to request blur for transparent windows--option argument for alacritty msg create-windowDECRQM/DECRPM escape sequencesThe release now uses TOML instead of YAML for configuration files. Run alacritty migrate command will automatically convert all the configuration files.
Other changes include:
draw_bold_text_with_bright_colors, key_bindings, and mouse_bindings.background_opacity, colors.search.bar, mouse.url, mouse.double_click.
The Github releases page, provides official packages for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
For Ubuntu users who are new to this terminal emulator, I’ve a tutorial teaching how to install Alacritty step by step.
