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Archives For November 30, 1999

GIMP 2.10.32 Released with BigTIFF / JPEG-XL Support [Ubuntu PPA]

Last updated: June 16, 2022 — 3 Comments

GIMP image editor released a new update for its stable 2.10 release series. Here’s what’s new and how to install in Ubuntu.

GIMP 2.10.32 comes with BigTIFF file import/export support, which is an evolution of the original TIFF format allowing files bigger than 4GiB. It also supports for importing 8 and 16-bit CMYK(A) TIFF in this release.

The release also backported the JPEG XL file format support from the 2.99.8 development release. It’s so far only has import ability, though a third-party plugin is available with both import and export support.

Other changes include:

  • New “Flip the image vertically on export” on DDS export dialog.
  • Support loading transparent EPS files
  • Improved support of TGA indexed images with alpha channel
  • new PDB procedure file-bmp-save2 for plugin developer.
  • Add localized glyphs (locl) support for Text tool.
  • on-hover indicator around the eye and link toggles
  • Add “Include mouse pointer” option for Screenshot tool in Windows.

How to Install GIMP 2.10.32 in Ubuntu:

GIMP as Flatpak:

GIMP offers official Linux package via universal Flatpak package.

For, Ubuntu 20.04 and higher, simply press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal, and run the command below one by one to install it:

  • Install the flatpak daemon via command: 
    sudo apt install flatpak
  • Then install GIMP via Flatpak using command: 
    flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.gimp.GIMP.flatpakref

Ubuntu PPA:

For those do not like sandboxed applications, I’ve uploaded the new release package into this unofficial PPA for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 21.10, and Ubuntu 20.04 with amd64 and arm64/armhf CPU architecture types support.

1. First, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. Then run command to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/gimp

Type user password (no visual feedback) when it asks for sudo authentication and hit Enter to continue.

2. Then, refresh system package cache by running command:

sudo apt update

3. And, finally install or update GIMP using command:

sudo apt install gegl gimp

Or, upgrade GIMP image editor via Software Updater after adding the PPA repository:

NOTE: Due to build failure of libjxl library for arm64. The official JPEG-XL plugin is excluded in this PPA for Ubuntu 20.04. You can however run the command below to install the third-party plugin mentioned above to get .jxl file import/export support.

sudo apt install libjxl-gimp-plugin
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Amberol & G4Music – The Best Looking Music Players for Linux

Last updated: June 14, 2022 — Leave a comment

There are quite a few music player applications for Linux. Amberol and G4Music are two of them with really good looking UI design.

Amberol:

Amberol is a GTK4 app uses libadwaita library as well as gaussian blurred cover background for the beautiful app window.

The player aims to be as small, unintrusive, and simple as possible. No music collection or playlist management, no metadata editor, no lyrics.

It just play local music, with basic functions like shuffle and repeat, MPRIS integration, drag and drop from file manager and GNOME integration.

G4Music

G4Music is Amberol inspired music player with quite similar user interface.

It’s so far a single developer software project, while Amberol has a small group of contributors. However, it has more features, including search music from large collection, sort by album/artist/title or shuffle. And, it supports samba and any other remote protocols as well as pipewire audio sink.

How to Install Amberol or G4Music in Ubuntu & other Linux:

The players are available to install as universal Flatpak packages, which work in Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and most other Linux systems.

1.) Firstly, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. Then, run the command below to install the flatpak daemon:

sudo apt install flatpak

Other Linux may follow the official setup guide to install the daemon.

2.) To install the Amberol, run the command below in terminal window:

flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/io.bassi.Amberol.flatpakref

Or install G4Music if you like the search function and pipewire audio sink. Both players will install GNOME 42 run-time libraries if not exist.

flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/com.github.neithern.g4music.flatpakref

Once installed, search for and open the music player from Activities overview and enjoy!

How to Uninstall Amberol / G4Music

To remove Amberol, open terminal and run command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data io.bassi.Amberol

And/or remove G4Music by running command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data com.github.neithern.g4music

To clear up useless run-time libraries, you may also run command:

flatpak uninstall --unused
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How to Import Photos from iPhone to Ubuntu 24.04 | 22.04

Last updated: August 24, 2024 — 24 Comments

This tutorial shows how to access and import your photos and videos from iPhone / iPad to Ubuntu 24.04 or Ubuntu 22.04 computer.

Ubuntu seems now have out-of-the-box support for accessing iOS photos. User can easily browse, copy, and move photo images and videos in connected iOS device using either the built-in file manager or a photo manager app (e.g., gThumb). And, here’s how to do the trick in Ubuntu step by step.

This tutorial is tested and works in my iPhone with iOS 16.1.1, and iPad with 14.4.2, along with Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04 with default GNOME Desktop. Thanks to @Trozpent, there’s a few tips in the comment below that may also help!
Continue Reading…

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Disable Lock Screen App Notifications in Ubuntu 24.04 | 22.04

Last updated: November 1, 2024 — Leave a comment

Some applications display notifications in the lock screen, which could be quite annoying!

If you want, you can disable all of them or certain app notifications easily via Gnome Control Center.

1.) Firstly, go to the top-right corner system menu. Then click on “Settings” to open system settings utility, which is also known as gnome control center.

2.) When it opens, navigate to “Notifications” from the left pane. Then, just turn off “Lock Screen Notifications” will disable all the notifications:

3.) For choice, you may scroll down to find out a certain application. Click on it, and toggle the option in the next pop-up dialog.

As you see, there are also options to turn on/off sound alerts, notification bubble, message content in per app basis.

That’s it. Enjoy!

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Vitals – Display CPU Temperature, Fan Speed, Memory Usage in Ubuntu Panel

Last updated: June 12, 2022 — 1 Comment

Want to display your computer’s temperature, voltage, fan speed, memory usage, and other system resources usage in top panel? Vitals is a good choice for Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation, and other Linux with GNOME desktop.

It’s a Gnome Shell extension that can display following information on your system tray area:

  • CPU core temerature.
  • Voltage.
  • Fan speed.
  • Memory and Swap usage.
  • Processor load, frequency.
  • System load, uptime.
  • Network speed.
  • Storage usage.

A drop-down menu is available to take a glimpse of all available data. And, user may click on menu option to select which to display on panel.

There are as well bottom buttons to quickly launch system monitor utility and open the extension “Preferences” dialog. In which, you may configure the refresh interval, indicator position, as well as toggle display sensors.

How to Install Vitals Extension:

The extension supports GNOME from version 3.18 to the current 42. Which means, you may install and run it in Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Fedora 34/35/36, and other Linux (e.g., Debian, Arch, Manjaro) with GNOME.

Method 1: Install the extension via browser

Ubuntu user needs to firstly press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. Then, run command to install the agent to install Gnome Extension from web browser.

sudo apt install chrome-gnome-shell

Then, go the link below and turn on the slider icon to install the extension:

Install Vitals Extension

Click the link in the page to install browser extension if you don’t see the slider icon, and refresh the page.

Method 2: Install the extension in Ubuntu 22.04 via Extension Manager

Ubuntu 22.04 defaults to Firefox as Snap which does not support installing Gnome Extensions. Besides using another browser or install back the classic .Deb package, “Extension Manager” is a good alternative.

1. Firstly, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run command to install the application:

sudo apt install gnome-shell-extension-manager

2. Next, search for and open the tool from either Activities overview or app grid:

3. Finally, navigate to ‘Browse’ tab in Extension Manager app, search for and install ‘Vitals’ extension:

The indicator should appear immediately on your system panel after installation.

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How to Install GNU Emacs (29.3 Updated) in Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04

Last updated: March 26, 2024 — 6 Comments

This simple tutorial shows how to install the GNU Emacs text editor 29.3 and keep up-to-date in Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04.

GNU Emacs text editor has reached v29.x release series for few months, though Ubuntu still has v27.1 in its universe repository. For those would like to install/upgrade the editor, here are 3 different ways to do the trick in Ubuntu and its based systems.

Method 1: Snap Package

Snap is an universal Linux package format that runs in sandbox. It works on most Linux, and updates automatically when a new release is published. GNU Emacs is available as Snap with support for amd64 modern PC/laptop, arm64/armhf, ppc64el and s390x processors.

Ubuntu user can simply search for and install the package from Ubuntu Software. There are multiple app packages in software center, select install the one from “Snap Store”.

Install Emacs from Ubuntu Software

For other Linux, it’s available to install via https://snapcraft.io/emacs

Method 2: Ubuntu PPA

For those do NOT like applications run in sandbox, there’s an Ubuntu PPA contains the native .deb package for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 24.04.

Like the Snap and Flatpak packages, it’s a third-party repository. Though the maintainer has been working on the PPA for more than 5 years. Also, it supports for amd64, arm64/armhf, and ppc64el CPU architecture types.

1. Firstly, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. Run command to remove the old emacs package if any, since it conflicts to the package from PPA.

sudo apt remove --autoremove emacs emacs-common

2. Then, run the command below to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/emacs

Type user password (no asterisk feedback) when it asks and hit Enter to continue.

3. Then run the command to update system package cache, which should be done automatically in Ubuntu 20.04 and higher during adding PPA.

sudo apt update

4. Finally, install Emacs via command:

sudo apt install emacs emacs-common

Here you may replace emacs with emacs-nox for text-only interface.

Method 3: Emacs Flatpak

The text editor is also available as the universal Flatpak package which runs in sandbox. Like Snap, the package runs in most Linux and it’s easy to update. However, it takes more disk space due to run-time libraries.

1. First, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run command to install the flatpak daemon:

sudo apt install flatpak

2. Then, install Emacs as Flatpak via command:

flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.gnu.emacs.flatpakref

How to Remove Emacs text editor

The Emacs Snap, Flatpak and Deb packages can be installed all together in your system. So, there may be duplicated app icons when you try to launch the editor.

To remove the Snap package, either use Ubuntu Software or run command in terminal:

sudo snap remove emacs

To remove the Flatpak package, use command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data org.gnu.emacs

And clear useless runtime via flatpak uninstall --unused.

To remove the Deb package, run command:

sudo apt remove --autoremove emacs emac-common

And remove the Ubuntu PPA via command:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/emacs
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Atom Code Editor to be Discontinued in December 2022

Last updated: June 9, 2022 — Leave a comment

The free open-source text and source code editor, Atom, is reaching the end of life!

Github, who is behind the editor, announced on June 8:

Today, we’re announcing that we are sunsetting Atom and will archive all projects under the organization on December 15, 2022.

Atom is cross-platform code editor developed by Github, the code hosting platform itself. It’s promoted as a “hackable text editor for the 21st Century”, as it is fully customizable in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The end-of-life announcement explained that Atom has no significant feature development for the past several years. The community involvement has declined significantly. So, they decided to sunset the project.

You know, Atom is a direct competitor to Microsoft’s Visual Studio (VS) Code. And, Microsoft acquired Github on June 4, 2018. That could be the real reason (IMO) though it takes 4 years 😄.

Anyhow, there are 6 months until the developer team archive the atom/atom repository. It’s time for those still using Atom to migrate to an alternative solution.

Alternative Code Editors:

There are quite a few good alternatives to Atom. Though I’m not a software developer, there are Sublime Text, Visual Studio (VS) Code, PyCharm, Brackets, Notepad++ as I know.

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Blender 3.2.0 Released with AMD GPU Rendering Support for Linux

Last updated: June 9, 2022 — Leave a comment

The free open-source 3D creation software Blender 3.2.0 was released! Finally, it adds support for AMD GPU rendering for Linux!

Blender 3.2.0 introduced a new type of Cycles render pass that contains only the lighting from a subset of light sources. It’s ‘Light Groups’ which can be used to modify the color and/or intensity of light sources in the compositor without re-rendering.

Cycles now supports selective rendering of caustics in shadows of refractive objects. Paint is now available in Sculpt mode. New paint brush comes with a bunch of new settings like tip shape, wet mixing, flow and density.

And there are many other changes including:

  • Using the voxel remesher all color attributes will be preserved.
  • Masking, auto-masking and face sets are fully supported with color attribute painting.
  • Duplicate Elements Node that can duplicate points, edges, faces, instances, and curves
  • Asset collections (no longer experimental)
  • Curve pen tool to quickly add, delete, and tweak control points
  • New Envelope modifier.
  • Manage video sequencer channels by giving channels a name, as well as mute and lock options
  • Webp image import/export support.
  • OpenColorIO color space aliases support
  • And much more.

How to Install Blender 3.2.0 in Ubuntu

It’s quite easy to install Blender in Ubuntu, since the official Snap package is available in Ubuntu Software. You just need to keep an eye on the source info in the header bar, and make sure it’s from Snap Store.

Don’t like the sandbox applications? Blender website also provides 64-bit Linux tarball for downloading:

Download Blender

Just extract, and run the executable file from extracted folder will launch the software. Or, you may follow this guide to create app shortcut for it.

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How to Install “Incompatible” GNOME Extension in Ubuntu / Fedora

Last updated: June 8, 2022 — Leave a comment

Your favorite GNOME extension is marked as “INCOMPATIBLE“? It might still work!

There are so many extensions to help improve Ubuntu, Fedora, or other Linux’s GNOME desktop experience. Some of them may be outdated for your GNOME version. So, you see “incompatible” instead of on/off switch when try installing via a web browser.

Sometimes, the extension is still compatible, but the Gnome version is not declared. You may try out and see if it works by disabling version validation, before bothering the extension developer.

NOTE: Disable version validation ONLY makes incompatible Gnome extensions install-able. Extensions may refuse to work!

Single command to disable version validation:

For those familiar with Linux commands, open terminal by searching from ‘Activities’ overview screen.

Then, run the single command to will disable version validation when trying to install Gnome extensions:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell disable-extension-version-validation true

Not only for Ubuntu and Fedora, it should also work for all Linux with GNOME desktop.

Disable version validation vid Dconf Editor:

For graphical configuration tool, you may first install Dconf Editor from Ubuntu Software (Gnome Software).

Then, click top-left ‘Activities’, search for and launch the tool.

Finally, navigate to “org/gnome/shell” in the configuration tool, and turn on the slider icon for “disable-extension-version-validation”.

Install incompatible extension via Extension Manager:

Since Ubuntu 22.04, user may simply press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. Then run command to install extension manager tool:

sudo apt install gnome-shell-extension-manager

Or, search for and install “Extension Manager” in Ubuntu Software (or Gnome Software).

Then, search for and launch the tool from ‘Activities’ overview.

Finally, navigate to ‘Browse’ tab to search for and install GNOME extensions. Though incompatible extensions are marked as “Unsupported”, user can still click on the button and confirm in pop-up dialog to install it anyway.

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How to install Coturn (TURN / STUN Server) in Ubuntu 22.04 via PPA

Last updated: June 6, 2022 — Leave a comment

Ubuntu 22.04 misses coturn TURN and STUN server package in its system repository. Here’s how to install it via PPA.

Coturn is a free open source implementation of TURN and STUN Server, which can be used as either a VoIP media traffic NAT traversal server and gateway, or general-purpose network traffic TURN server and gateway.

The software package is available in all current Ubuntu releases, exclude Ubuntu 22.04! The reason that the new LTS exclude the package might be a compile issue due to OpenSSL 3.0 does no longer has FIPS 140 mode.

When you try installing the package in terminal, it will output that “E: Package ‘coturn’ has no installation candidate“.

Coturn is NOT available in Ubuntu 22.04 repository

Ubuntu 22.10 development branch has added a patch to fix build the package against OpenSSL 3.0, and here’s an unofficial backport for Ubuntu 22.04 via PPA repository.

NOTE: I’m NOT sure if it’s the real reason that Ubuntu 22.04 exclude the package in its repository. Use the PPA package in your own risk!

1. Add the PPA

The PPA provides the coturn packages for amd64, arm64/armhf, ppc64el, and s390x CPU architectures for Ubuntu 22.04 and its based systems.

To get started, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run the command below to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/coturn

Type user password for sudo authentication and hit Enter to continue.

2. Update cache

It should automatically refresh system package cache while adding PPA. If not, run the command below to do it manually:

sudo apt update

3. Install Coturn

Finally, install the software package by running command in terminal:

sudo apt install coturn

How to Uninstall Coturn

For any issue about the TURN server packages, run the command below to remove it from your system:

sudo apt remove --autoremove coturn

And, remove the Ubuntu PPA using command:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/coturn
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