Mozilla Firefox 91.0 is available with more than 1200 bug-fixes, new major privacy enhancement, and other features.
The release introduced more comprehensive logic for clearing cookies. With Firefox Strict Mode, you can clear a site data including embed content, such as images, videos and scripts, from other websites. This “cross-site” content was previously left behind.
You can now clear cookies and site data for current page by clicking the SSL lock icon in url bar. Or by right-clicking on sites under History menu and select ‘Forgot About This Site’.
For all sites, go to Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Cookies and Site Data. There you can click on “Manage Data” to search a site or remove all sites.
Firefox 91 now https first in Private Browsing windows. Even by clicking or entering http site in url, it tries to connect https first if available.
Other changes include:
Supports logging into Microsoft, work, and school accounts using Windows single sign-on.
Add Simplified option back in print settings.
New locale: Scots (sco)
The address bar now provides Switch to Tab results also in Private Browsing windows.
Automatic High Contrast Mode when “Increase Contrast” is checked on MacOS
10-20% improvement in response time to most user interactions.
Various security fixes.
How to Install Firefox 91:
Usually, Ubuntu publishes the new Firefox packages through the security & updates repositories. So just wait and keep your system updated. It’s will be available in next few days.
Alternatively, see the release note and download the portable package from Firefox website.
Want to cut a clip out of a video and share with your friends? Try Video Trimmer, a stupid easy way for those working on Linux.
In Linux there are quite a few ways to cut clips or trim videos either in graphical or using command line tools. While video editors are heavy to do the job, FFmpeg is the most efficient choice. And Video Trimmer offers an intuitive user interface for those hate Linux commands.
It’s a free and open-source GTK app based on FFmpeg. By importing video via top-left “Open” button, you can preview the video and write down the start and end timestamps. And the top-left button turns to ‘Trim‘ for cutting the clip out.
It outputs the clip as a new video file. And the process is super fast and does not reduce the video quality, because it just cuts the data steam but never re-code.
Install Video Trimmer in Linux:
The source code of the project is hosted on gitlab. Besides building from the source, you can install it on most Linux via the Flatpak package.
Got Razer peripherals? Polychromatic released version 0.7.0 with redesigned UI and command line interface to control the RGB lighting in Linux.
For those never heard of Polychromatic, it’s a free open-source vendor agnostic front-end for managing lighting, RGB effects and some special functionality for keyboards, mouse, keypads and other gaming peripherals.
It so far only supports OpenRazer as backend for Razer devices. Though it aims to add OpenRGB and phue for Philips Hue and more brands support.
The software now uses PyQt5 instead of WebKitGTK for its graphical user interface. And it redesigned the UI with following features:
New tab & sidebar interface.
New preferences dialog.
New colour picker dialog and saved colour management.
New “Apply to All” section
New “Inspect Matrix” for testing LEDs and co-ordinates
New DPI controls, allowing independent X/Y axis.
Add ability to set custom DPI stages.
Ability to use “native” system theme.
polychromatic new UI
The indicator menu in the release is also overhauled with legacy GTK Status Icon support, and new options.
The release also introduced a new command line interface for terminal warrior. You can get started by running command in terminal:
polychromatic-cli --help
For any device capable of individually addressable LEDs, you can now create your own static and animated effects via the Effect Editor, by clicking & draging with your pointer to draw on a graphic representing your devices, or use a grid.
So far the device graphics are available for the following devices: Razer BlackWidow Chroma, Razer BlackWidow Elite, Razer DeathStalker Chroma, Razer Huntsman Elite, Razer Mamba Elite, Razer Mamba Tournament Edition, Razer Blade Stealth (2016), Razer Blade (2018), Razer Blade Pro (2019), Razer Firefly, Razer Base Station Chroma. While the grid is always available.
Other changes include:
App can run without OpenRazer, but will be limited.
Add support for multizoned hardware.
Support custom effects for all compatible hardware.
New troubleshooter and new configuration editor.
New and updated icons.
How to Install Polychromatic in Ubuntu:
The Polychromatic team maintains official Ubuntu PPA that so far supports for Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, Ubuntu 21.10, and Linux Mint 20.
Open terminal from start menu, paste the command below and hit run to add the PPA:
And you can remove the 2 Ubuntu PPAs by launching “Software & Updates” and navigating to “Other Software” tab. Then remove the relevant lines from the list:
Real-time strategy video game 0 A.D. released version Alpha 25 a day ago. Code name is “Yaunã”.
0 A.D. (pronounced “zero ey-dee”) is a free and open-source RTS game under development by Wildfire Games, that works on Windows, Linux, and MAC. It is a historically-based war/economy game that allows players to relive or rewrite the history of Western civilizations, focusing on the years between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D.
“Yaunã” comes with the twenty-fifth alpha version that initially implements Single Player Campaigns, along with other big ones including:
Improved Pathfinding, Performance And Reduced Game Lag.
Push new orders to the front Of their production queues.
Improved Unit AI.
New Biomes incorporating wew 2k textures and normal/specular maps.
GUI improvements.
Extended Graphics options.
Improved Mod support and game filtering in the multiplayer lobby.
Ongoing civilization balancing.
Various other game stability bug fixes and speedups.
See video about 0 A.D. Alpha 25:
How to Install 0 A.D in Ubuntu:
The game package is available in Ubuntu repository but always old! To get the latest version, keep an eye on this Ubuntu PPA while the official one is not being updated for long time.
Usually, maintainers update the latest software packages a few days after the release note. For beginners, you can follow this tutorial to add the PPA and install 0 A.D. once the new package published.
Missing the old Ubuntu Unity style login screen? It’s easy to get it back in Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04 and higher.
LightDM, stands for Light Display Manager, is a free open-source project by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. Ubuntu up to version 16.04 LTS uses it as the default display manager. And it’s present in Linux Mint 20 and some Ubuntu flavors.
For those prefer the LightDM style login screen, it’s available in Ubuntu universe repositories:
How to Install LightDM in Ubuntu 20.04 & Higher:
Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open a terminal window. When it opens, paste the command below and hit enter:
sudo apt install lightdm unity-greeter
While the installing process, it will prompt to configure the display manager. Just hit Enter on the screen.
At the next screen, use up/down arrow key to choose “lightdm” and hit Enter to apply.
Once installed, restart your computer and you’ll see the new login screen!
Configure LightDM login screen:
Uses are mostly want to remove the white dots and change the login background wallpaper.
To do so, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command to install dconf-editor if you don’t have it:
sudo apt install dconf-editor
Next, run command to grant lightdm user privilege to access control list:
xhost +SI:localuser:lightdm
Finally launch dconf editor via lightdm:
sudo -u lightdm dconf-editor
When it opens, navigate to “com/canonical/unity-greeter“. Then turn off ‘draw-grid’, and change background image as you want.
Ubuntu 21.10 daily build got an update for its gnome-control-center package(System Settings) recently. The ‘Standard’ mode is finally removed from the Appearance settings.
The Yaru theme developer team submitted the request to remove the ‘Standard’ theme when in June, since both GTK3 and GTK4 do NOT support having different background / text colors for headerbar than in the rest of the window.
The development build of Ubuntu 21.10 finally apply the change in the recent update. The ‘Window colors’ options under Appearance settings are now only fully dark and fully light. There’s no longer dark header bar with light window color called ‘Standard’.
Along with the new thumbnail preview, the context menus for the desktop, file manager, and other Gnome apps also inherit the dark and light appearance setting.
They are still some apps, e.g, Gnome Terminal and Ubuntu Software, that are not implemented for the changes.
As before, the settings do not change the color of top-bar menus, notification, and left dock menu, etc. However, a patched version of gnome-control-center is available to easily toggle the WHOLE system to Dark or Light.
DeaDBeeF audio player 1.8.8 was released as the 8th bugfix release for the 1.8 series.
The new release introduced some new features, including reading WAV RIFF tags, handling of Disc subtitle frames in ID3v2 and APE tags, and handling samplerates higher than 192KHz to pulseaudio.
New context menu options “Play Next” and “Play Later” are now available to choose your favorite song to play next, or set one-time play order for songs in play list. It will add marks at the beginning that indicates the sequence.
It also redesigned the plugin page in Preferences. Now each plugin has the configuration along with basic info and license in tabs.
Other changes in DeaDBeef 1.8.8 includes:
Non-modal preferences window
$rgb() title formatting function
Group title colorization support via title formatting
Plugin report and filtering in Plugin list
Focusable playlist tabs with keyboard navigation support
Sorting plugin list alphabetically
Improved album path handling, especially for Windows
Drag-and-drop on the main window
Using scroll wheel with seek bar
Delete from disk dialog will highlight the Delete button as destructive action
And some stability fixes.
How to Install DeaDBeeF 1.8.8 in Ubuntu:
The software offers official .deb package for 64-bit Ubuntu & Linux Mint systems.
Grab the package, ‘deadbeef-static_1.8.8-1_amd64.deb’, then install it by running command in terminal:
sudo apt install ~/Downloads/deadbeef-static*.deb
There’s also an Ubuntu PPA for DeaDBeeF, though it’s not updated at the moment of writing. And note that the PPA package conflicts to the official ‘deadbeef-static‘ package due to packaging issue. Remove the old package first if you’re going to install it from another source.
Remove DeaDBeeF:
To remove the music player, simply run command in terminal:
This simple tutorial shows how to install and setup Gerbera home media server in all current Ubuntu and Debian releases.
Gerbera is a free and open-source UPnP media server for Linux, BSD, and Mac OS. With it, you can stream audio and/or video files over home network, and play on any device with a media player with UPnP support, e.g., VLC.
How to Gerbera in Ubuntu / Debian via its official repository
Gerbera is available in Ubuntu repositories but always old. It’s however quite easy to install the latest version since it offers an official apt repository. And so far, it supports for Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, Debian Buster & Bullseye.
1.) Firstly open terminal from start menu. Then paste the command below and hit run to install the key:
Want to get better performance when playing games in Linux? Try GameMode!
GameMode is a free open-source Linux project allows games to request a set of optimizations be temporarily applied to the host and/or game process.
The project was originally designed as a stop-gap solution to problems with Intel and AMD CPU powersave or ondemand governors. But now GameMode supports for optimizations including:
CPU governor
I/O priority
Process niceness
Kernel scheduler
Screensaver inhibiting
GPU performance mode (NVIDIA and AMD), GPU overclocking (NVIDIA)
Custom scripts
1. How to Install GameMode in Ubuntu Linux:
The package is available in Ubuntu as well as most other Linux repositories.
Firstly open terminal by either searching from ‘Activities’ overview screen, or pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When terminal opens, run command to install it:
sudo apt install gamemode
For Fedora and CentOS Linux, you can install it via command:
sudo dnf install gamemode
(Optional) Install GameMode indicator:
For choice, you can install an indicator applet that shows the current status of GameMode. It’s an extension for the default Gnome desktop.
a.) Open terminal and run command to make sure chrome-gnome-shell browser integration is installed:
If you don’t see the toggle icon, click the “click here to install browser extension” link to install browser extension and reload the page.
Finally, search for and open ‘Gnome Extensions App’ from start menu. And click on the gear button to configure the status indicator.
2. How to Run Game in GameMode:
Some games and platforms have integrated GameMode support. Which means you don’t have to do anything to activate it. They are:
DiRT 4
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia
Total War: Three Kingdoms
Total War: WARHAMMER II
ATLauncher Minecraft launcher
Lutris
For other games, you can now run the executable command by adding gamemoderun at the beginning. For example, run SuperTux2 in GameMode via:
gamemoderun supertux2
For steam, you can simply add gamemoderun %command% as launch option.
And without launching game every time from command line, write the rule into app shortcut file. They are .desktop files generally locate in “/usr/share/applications” directory.
For example, edit SuperTux 2 app shortcut via command:
When the file opens, add gamemoderun before executable command in Exec line.
For Hybrid GPU users, the GameMode supports environment variable via GAMEMODERUNEXEC. So you can run GameMode while using dedicated gpu for rendering game which will be displayed using the integrated card. For example:
The Linux Mint team introduced many great new apps in recent releases. And now an Ubuntu PPA is available that contains these apps for all current Ubuntu releases.
Without adding Linux Mint repository and setting the priority, an Ubuntu PPA is good choice to install or receive the package updates.
And ‘Butterfly’, a top contributor of Linux Mint project on launchpad, maintains the PPA repository with packages so far for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 23.10, and Ubuntu 24.04 support. And the PPA contains updated version of the following packages:
Bulky batch file renamer.
Hypnotix IPTV player.
Pix image viewer and browser.
Sticky notes app.
Warpinator LAN file transfer.
Mint’s Web App Manager.
And some more.
Add PPA and Install Linux Mint Apps in Ubuntu:
1. Add the PPA.
Firstly, open terminal either from start menu, or press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When terminal opens, paste the command below and hit Enter to add the PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kelebek333/mint-tools
Type user password, no visual feedback, when it asks and hit Enter to continue.
2. Next install or update Linux Mint apps:
After adding the PPA, you can now install one or all of the previous apps via apt command.
For example, install the web app manager via command:
sudo apt install webapp-manager
For other apps, replace webapp-manager in the command with bulky, hypnotix, pix, or warpinator.
And if an update version is available, you’ll be able to upgrade the package via Software Updater along with system updates.
Uninstall PPA and Linux Mint Apps:
To remove these Linux Mint apps, run apt command with remove flag. For example, remove bulky via command:
sudo apt remove --autoremove bulky
As well, replace bulky in command with other package to remove.
