News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
Ubuntu 24.04, code-name Noble Numbat, is finally available for Beta testing after a week of delay.
Ubuntu 24.04 is long term support (LTS) release with 5-year of support. By enabling Ubuntu Pro, user can get 7 years more security updates. Meaning that Ubuntu LTS has 12 years of support!
The new LTS features GA Kernel 5.8 and GNOME Desktop 46.
This tutorial shows how to enable variable refresh rate (VRR) to get better gaming experience in Ubuntu 24.04 with default GNOME Desktop.
Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), aka adaptive sync, is a feature that allows your monitor to adjust the refresh rate on the fly, so it matches the frame rate of output signal from the graphics card. It’s useful for games to eliminate screen tearing, and can also lowers power consumption since the monitor does not need to always refresh at the highest rate.
GNOME introduced experimental VRR since version 46 in default Wayland. Here I’m going to how to enable this feature.
Before getting started, you need to check something to make sure you meet all the requirements for enabling this feature.
Continue Reading…
This tutorial shows how to install PeaZip file archive manager and setup file manager integration in Ubuntu Desktop.
PeaZip is a free open-source archive manager for Windows, Linux, macOS, and BSD. It’s based on open source technologies of 7-Zip, p7zip, Brotli, FreeArc, PAQ, Zstandard, and PEA projects. And, supports over 200 archive types including 7Z / XZ / TXZ, ACE (*), BZ2 / TBZ, Brotli BR, GZ / TGZ, ISO, RAR, TAR, WIM, ZIP, ZIPX, ZPAQ, Zstandard ZST and more.
The free file archiver is easy to install in Ubuntu and other Linux through its official binary package. It provides a GUI window, and integrates well into file manager context menu.
After more than a year of development, Kodi media player 21, code-name “Omega”, is finally released!
Kodi 21 is a new major release. It’s now based on FFmpeg 6.0, that features Radiance HDR image support, VAAPI decoding and QSV decoding for 10/12bit 422, 10/12bit 444 HEVC and VP9, MediaCodec decoder, and various other exciting new features, see ffmpeg.org for details.
For macOS, the release supports HiDPI (retina) displays using its native implementations for window displays. And, it fixed crash on speech recognition activation, improved window resizing when moving (or fallback when display disconnected) from one display to another, and implemented Hotkeycontroller for media keys.
Continue Reading…
Have many Flatpak app packages installed on your Linux desktop or mobile? Here’s an app to install, remove, downgrade, and manage app data with a simple graphical interface.
Flatpak is getting popular in today’s Linux, and some (e.g., Linux Mint, Fedora, and Pop!_OS) even have it support out-of-the-box. User can install (or uninstall) a Flatpak package by either using system package manager or running a Linux command in terminal. And, there’s a popular graphical tool Flatseal to manage permissions for each app package.
For users who want to get more controls for their Flatpak app packages, there’s a free open-source tool warehouse available for choice.
warehouse app window is adaptive
FFmpeg media library is now at version 8.0! Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 25.04, Linux Mint 21/22 from PPA.
The new FFmpeg 8.0 version of this popular multi-media library came with name “Huffman”. It features native decoders for Samsung’s Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec, Apple’s ProRes RAW, Sanyo LD-ADPCM, RealVideo 6.0, G.728, and ADPCM IMA Xbox.
It also added encoding support for APV (via libopenapv wrapper), libx265 alpha layer, and animated JPEG XL images (through libjxl), as well as Vulkan compute-based codecs support for FFv1 (encoding and decoding) and ProRes RAW (decode only).
This is a step by step guide shows how to install Discord instant messaging app and keep it up-to-date in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
Discord is a popular instant messaging and VoIP social platform, that supports voice & video calls, text messaging, media and files. It works in Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS/iPadOS, and web browser.
Discord for Linux so far supports only x86_64 (AMD/Intel CPUs) platform with following packages:
The Beta release of Ubuntu 24.04, Noble Numbat, has been pushed to April 11, 2024, one week after the previous date (April 4, 2024)!
It’s because an attack publicly disclosed on March 29, 2024.
An attacker using the name “Jia Tan” installed a backdoor into liblzma library. It’s a part of xz, which happens to be a dependency of OpenSSH in Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. The backdoor sends hidden commands at the start of an SSH session, allowing the attacker to run an arbitrary command on the target system without logging in.
Russ Cox, Google’s Golang developer, post a page talking about timeline of the xz open source attack. According to the post, “Jia Tan”, the attacker, started contributing to xz since October 2021, and became a maintainer since the second half of 2022.
Attack began on 2024-02-23, and Debian Unstable, Ubuntu 24.04 (Dev), Fedora 40 Beta and Fedora Rawhide have been affected.
Continue Reading…
This is a step by step guide shows how to install Google Chrome web browser and keep it up-to-date in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Ubuntu 25.10.
Google Chrome is the top popular web browser today. It is a proprietary software free for use. For those who prefer open-source, then Google also offers Chromium browser for choice.
Google Chrome is available to install in Linux on only Intel/AMD platform through 2 ways! They are:
Here I’m going to show you how to install the browser in both ways. Choose either that you prefer.
This tutorial shows how to install the popular Spotify music app in Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 24.10 though Snap, Deb, or Flatpak packages.
Spotify supports for Linux officially through Snap package which runs in sandbox environment, and Deb package that’s native in Debian and Ubuntu.
For choice, there’s also a community maintained Flatpak package, which also runs in sandbox environment. All of them is available for only x86_64 (Intel/AMD CPUs) platform so far.
Spotify for Linux packages:
