Gnome Tweaks, one of the must have apps for configuring Ubuntu, removes GNOME Shell Extensions support by releasing version 40.
Which means in next Ubuntu release which will ship with Gnome 40+, you have to use another tool to manage Gnome Shell Extensions.
If you have tried out Fedora 34, you should already see the prompt at first launch of Gnome Tweaks: “Extensions management has been moved to GNOME Extensions”.
The “new” tool “GNOME Extensions” is available in Ubuntu universe repositories since Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. If you don’t have it, open terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard, and run command to install it:
sudo apt install gnome-shell-extension-prefs
Then you can open it from system app launcher.
Different to the extensions tab in Gnome Tweaks, the GNOME Extensions tool displays built-in Gnome Shell extensions and user installed extensions separately.
Besides the slider icons to toggle on/off extensions and gear buttons to change extension settings, there’s a triangle icon after each extension. Clicking on the icon will expand the extension with a brief description as well as the website and remove buttons.
In addition, Fedora users can get the tool by installing gnome-extensions-app package. Other Linux with Gnome Desktop can install the flatpak package.
After a clean Ubuntu installation, you have to tweak the desktop appearance more or less to meet your needs.
Besides struggling with different system configuration tools, e.g., System Settings, Gnome Tweaks and Dconf Editor, ‘Ubuntu First Steps‘ is a handy tool with mostly used options to tweak your Ubuntu Desktop.
Update 2024: The project has NOT been updated for a few years. I MAY or MAY NOT work anymore!
It’s a free and open-source tool written in Python with ability to tweak the dock launcher:
Dock position.
Enable minimize on click action.
Reduce dock length.
Enable dock on multi monitors.
Show apps at top, and more.
It also offers options to change desktop icon size, show or hide home and trash icons, change date & time display, show battery percentage, and enable HiDPI Fractional Scaling.
With it, you can easily enable or disable camera, microphone, and sound output, and stop Ubuntu remembering application usage, recent, temporary, and trash files.
There’s also “Repositories” tab with a list of Ubuntu PPAs. It is however not recommended to use the feature as some are either obsolete (e.g., GIMP PPA, Audacity PPA) or useless (e.g., Grub Customizer, it’s available in main repository).
In addition, some useful apps e.g., VLC, GIMP, Blender, and FileZilla, can be installed from “Applications” tab via singe click.
NOTE to apply changes, you have to click the upper-left corner gear button!
How to install ‘Ubuntu First Steps’:
The software developer built the package with only Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS support.
Open terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run following commands one by one to add the PPA and install the tool:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
sudo apt install ubuntu-first-steps
Once installed, open it from system app launcher and enjoy!
How to Remove:
To remove the Ubuntu PPA, either go to Software & Updates -> Other Software or open terminal and run command:
Looking a graphical tool to manage users and groups in Ubuntu Desktop? Try the classic Gnome user settings tool.
A user is anyone who uses a computer, and users may be grouped together into a “group”. Users and groups are used to control access to the system’s files, directories, and peripherals.
For those hate Linux commands, the classic GUI tool, which was default in Ubuntu when it was Gnome 2, allows to add, remove, edit users and groups.
Like system default User Settings, it offers options to add, remove, and edit all user accounts. Though there are a few differences:
It can generate random password for user account.
Automatic login option seems not working.
Custom user privileges under Advanced Settings.
By clicking on “Manage Groups” button, you can then add, remove, edit groups.
To add or remove a user from a group, simply go to group properties, and check or un-check the user name under Group Numbers.
To install the GUI user and group managing tool, open terminal from system app launcher and run command:
sudo apt install gnome-system-tools
Then search for and open “Users and Groups” from system app launcher and enjoy!
Running Ubuntu as virtual machine via VirtualBox? You may encounter permission issue to access the shared folder between host and guest.
Shared Folders is an useful feature for file sync between Virtualbox host and guest OSes. However, after you created one, the shared folder is marked with cross and lock icons. And it pops up an error dialog when you trying to open it:
Unhandled error message:
GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1.Error.Failed: Unix process subject does not have uid set.
Or it prompts permission issue while accessing from the left pane in file manager:
You do not have permissions necessary to view the contents of “xxx”
Fix shared folder permission issue:
The shared folder belongs to vboxsf group in the guest. All you need to do is add your user into this group.
There are a few ways to add an user to a group. Here I’m going to do it via a single command:
Firstly, start the virtual machine and login.
Open a terminal window from system app launcher.
When terminal opens, run command to check your username in case you don’t remember:
whoami
Finally add user to vboxsf group (replace USER_NAME with what printed in last command.):
Szyszka is a new batch file renaming tool written in Rust programming language with GTK+ 3 toolkit. And it works on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS.
The name, Szyszka, is Polish word which means Pinecone. The tool has a very simple user interface, simple click “Add Entries”, press and hold Shift, or Ctrl to select your desired files. Add folder is not supported in the first 1.0 release, it is however marked as planned feature.
You can then add multiple rules which can be freely combined:
Replace text
Trim text
Adding text
Adding numbers
Purge text
Change letters to big/small
Use custom rule
While adding rules, it shows example at bottom with before and after change which is extremely helpful for beginners.
How to Get Szyszka in Ubuntu:
The tool is available in Ubuntu Software as Snap package. Before installing it, you can try the .Appimage package which is available to download in the releases page:
Once you get it, right-click and go to file ‘Properties’ dialog. Then check “Allow executing file as program” in Permissions tab. Finally right-click and select ‘Run’ the Appimage.
As a new project, there may have bugs. Please report issue at the Github page.
Kodi 19.1, the first update for the “Matrix” series, was released with various bug-fixes.
The new release of the media player and entertainment hub contains mainly bug-fixes. It fixed HDR metadata detection issue, playback of optical DVDs in Linux, and BD-J Blu-ray chapter skipping via remotes/keyboard.
System fonts and use fonts detection for ASS subtitles, as well as rendering of semi-transparent ASS subtitles on Wayland are now fixed in the release.
Kodi 19.1 also enabled filecaching by default for network filesystems, improved reliability for HTTP and NFS network filesystems, and added support for WS-Discovery protocol to locate SMB servers and browse shared folders via SMBv3.
Other changes in the release include:
Fixed media flagging for DVD/BluRay
Fixed incorrect HDR metadata
Fixed green screen when playing the menu of some DVDs
The official Kodi PPA has made the packages for all current Ubuntu releases including Ubuntu 21.04.
Open terminal either from system app launcher or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, do following steps one by one.
1. Add Kodi PPA.
To add the official Kodi PPA, run command in terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
Type user password when it asks, with no asterisk feedback, and hit Enter to continue.
2. Install / Update Kodi.
If you’re now running the stock version of Kodi package in Ubuntu, the Software Updater will refused to update it. So it’s recommended to use the command below to install or update the media player.
Firstly refresh system package cache, if you’re on Ubuntu 18.04, via command:
sudo apt update
Then install Kodi via command:
sudo apt install kodi
Once installed Kodi, either launch it from system app launcher or log out and select “Kodi” session to login.
How to Downgrade:
You can purge the Ubuntu PPA as well as downgrade Kodi to the stock version available in Ubuntu main repositories. To do so, run command:
HP printer drivers for Linux, HPLIP, released version 3.21.4 today with new devices and Linux distros support.
HPLIP 3.21.4 is a small release adds HP Envy 6400 series printers support, and adds new systems LinuxMint 20.1, Debian 10.8 support. Ubuntu 21.04 is not yet supported though it has been released for a few weeks.
And it does not install in Ubuntu 20.04 in my case, though it works in Ubuntu 20.10 and Ubuntu 18.04.
Download & Install HPLIP 3.21.4:
HPLIP packages are hosted on sourceforge.net, go to link below and download the “hplip-3.21.4.run” package:
FFmpeg 4.4 “Rao” now can be installed in all current Ubuntu releases easily via an Ubuntu PPA.
FFmpeg is a free and open-source solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. The major 4.4 version was released almost a months ago with PGX decoder, AV1 encoding support SVT-AV1, AV1 decoder with hardware acceleration used only, AV1 VAAPI decoder, and so many other new features.
Thanks to Rob Savoury, an Ubuntu PPA is available contains the packages for all current Ubuntu releases.
1.) Add the PPA:
Firstly open terminal either from system app launcher or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run the command below to add the PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:savoury1/ffmpeg4
Type user password (no asterisk feedback) when it asks and hit Enter to continue.
2.) (Optional) Add optional PPAs:
For newest versions of graphics and multimedia dependencies, you can also add the following PPAs by running commands one by one:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:savoury1/graphics
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:savoury1/multimedia
3.) Finally install / update FFmpeg:
As a widely used media library, it’s mostly installed on your system. So you can run command to upgrade it in terminal:
sudo apt full-upgrade
NOTE: using Software Updater is not recommended in the case. It may keep back FFmpeg since old libraries may be required for some apps, Pitivi in the case.
4.) Check FFmpeg version:
Once installed, run command to check software version:
ffmpeg -version
How to Restore Stock FFmpeg version:
You can purge the Ubuntu PPA which will also downgrade FFmpeg libraries to the stock version in Ubuntu. Also purging the FFmpeg PPA may also remove some apps for unknown reasons :(.
Want to try out the Pipewire sound server? It’s easy to do this in Ubuntu 21.10 / Ubuntu 21.04, and here’s how!
PipeWire is a server for handling multimedia on Linux. Its most common use is for Wayland and Flatpak apps to implement audio and video playback and capture with minimal latency. And it offers seamless support for PulseAudio, JACK, ALSA, and GStreamer based applications.
Use Pipewire to replace PulseAudio in Ubuntu 21.10 & Ubuntu 21.04:
Ubuntu now has better Pipewire support in recent releases. The service is even running out-of-the-box in Ubuntu 21.10.
1.) Update system
Firstly, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal and run command to install all available package updates (recommend for those still running Ubuntu 21.04).
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
A system restart may be required if you haven’t done system package update for long period of time.
2.) Install the latest Pipewire libraries:
Thanks to the “PipeWire Upstream PPA“, it contains the latest Pipewire libraries to make all the things easy!
Open terminal and run the command below to add the PPA:
5.) I followed the previous steps via Debian Wiki, but it didn’t work. The system tray sound icon’s gone, and pactl info outputs “Connection failure: Connection refused”.
To workaround the issue, enable pipewire-media-session service may work by running command:
KeePass password manager released version 2.48 a few days ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 21.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 18.04 via PPA.
KeePass 2.48 introduces version 4.1 of the KDBX file format, which supports various new features, including:
group tags support,
ability to disable password quality estimation
remember the previous parent group when moving an entry/group into a different group
custom icons now have names and last modification or deletion times
save last modification time for custom date items.
Other changes include:
Add command ‘Move to Previous Parent Group’
Add support for loading images with Exif orientation tags.
Enhanced the LastPass import module to support CSV files created by the latest versions.
Enhanced the nPassword import module to import group tags.
Various user interface improvements.
How to Install KeePass 2.48 in Ubuntu via PPA:
KeePass2 is still available to install via an Ubuntu PPA. So far, the PPA supports for Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10, and Ubuntu 21.04.
