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Top New Features in GNOME 46, the Desktop for Ubuntu 24.04

Last updated: February 10, 2024 — Leave a comment

GNOME 46 reached UI, ABI/API, and feature freeze stage today. Let’s see the top new features in this popular desktop environment.

GNOME 46 will be the default desktop environment for Fedora 40 Workstation, Ubuntu 24.04, and optional in Arch, Manjaro, etc Linux.

It continues polish the desktop appearance by redesigning the improving the core app experiences.

GNOME Files, aka Nautilus, to have explicit Global Search mode, allowing to find files and folders in all search locations. And a “Search Settings” button is available to filter search results.

In Howtos Gnome

How to Install GO (golang 1.23) in Ubuntu 24.04 | 22.04

Last updated: September 23, 2024 — 3 Comments

Go programming language announced the new 1.23 release on 13 August, 2024! Here’s the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu & other Linux.

What’s New in Go 1.23:

The “range” clause in a “for-range” loop now accepts iterator functions of the following types: func(func() bool), func(func(K) bool), func(func(K, V) bool).
preview support for generic type aliases
Add All, Values, Backward, Collect, AppendSeq, Sorted, SortedFunc, SortedStableFunc, Chunk functions in slices package.
Add All, Keys, Values, Insert, Collect functions in maps package.
Add new structs package provides types for struct fields that modify properties of the containing struct type such as memory layout.
Go toolchain is possible to collect usage and breakage statistics
New go env -changed, go mod tidy -diff flags
Setting the GOROOT_FINAL environment variable no longer has an effect.
The go list -m -json command now includes new Sum and GoModSum fields
The go vet subcommand now reports symbols that are too new for the intended Go version.
New iter, structs, unique packages.
supports the new godebug directive in go.mod and go.work files
time.Timer and time.Ticker no longer referred to by the program become eligible for garbage collection immediately
the timer channel associated with a Timer or Ticker is now unbuffered, with capacity 0.

See the announcement for more changes in Go 1.23.

In Howtos, News golang

Enable Fingerprint Reader in Ubuntu 24.04/22.04 for ThinkPad T480s

Last updated: December 25, 2024 — 28 Comments

This is a step by step guide shows how to enable fingerprint reader support for Lenovo ThinkPad T480/T480s, X1 Carbon 6th gen, X1 Yoga 3rd gen, X280, etc with 06cb:009a device in Ubuntu 22.04.

Ubuntu has fingerprint reader support out-of-the-box using libfprint, and provides option to enable fingerprint login in Users settings page. However, the library has a list of unsupported devices, including 06cb:009a that’s built-in in my used ThinkPad T480s laptop.

Thankfully, there’s a free open-source alternative python-validity that works in my case. Here’s how to install and set it up in Ubuntu 22.04, while Ubuntu 20.04 is also supported.

NOTE: This tutorial may also work in many other fingerprint readers, however, the project so far does NOT provide a page to list all supported devices.

Step 1: Tell Which Fingerprint Reader device your laptop have

First of all, you may press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open up a terminal window.

Then run command to find out the device name of your fingerprint reader:

In Howtos fingerprint reader

How to Set Battery Charge Limit in Ubuntu 22.04 & 24.04

Last updated: December 27, 2024 — 8 Comments

This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to configure your Ubuntu laptop to limit the maximum battery charge level.

For those who keep laptop plugged in for long term, it’s better to set battery charge limit to reduce the battery wear by constantly trickle charging.

Linux Kernel supports battery charge threshold, and there’s a merge request to provide graphical UI options in Gnome Control Center. Until GNOME officially support this feature, you can follow this tutorial to do the job step by step.

In Howtos battery

New PPA to Install .NET 8 in old Ubuntu 18.04 & Ubuntu 16.04

Last updated: February 5, 2024 — 2 Comments

For .NET developers, the latest .NET 8 can be installed on old Ubuntu 18.04 and/or Ubuntu 16.04 LTS easily through PPA.

.NET 8 was released few months ago in November, 2023. It’s a new LTS release with 3 years support, and features new code generator “Dynamic Profile-Guided Optimization” (PGO), AVX-512 instruction set, out-of-the-box AI features, first preview of .NET Aspire, native AoT, and various other changes. See the release note for details.

.NET 8 is made into Ubuntu system repositories for Ubuntu 23.10 and upcoming Ubuntu 24.04. For Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, I’ve written how to install .NET 8 from Microsoft repository.

For users of Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 who can’t upgrade the system, there’s now a third-party PPA contains the .NET 8 packages for 64-bit Intel/AMD machines.

The PPA is maintained by Rob Savoury, who maintains so many PPAs with Blender, Chromium, FFmpeg, Firefox, LibreOffice, Qt5/6, Python, LLVM, Node.js, and other popular software packages with old Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 support!

In Howtos microsoft

How to Install and Use Incus Container in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

Last updated: February 4, 2024 — Leave a comment

This simple tutorial shows how to install and use Incus container in Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Incus is a free open-source system container and virtual machine manager developed by Linux Containers community. It supports images for a large number of Linux distributions.

With it, you can manage your containers and VMs either with a simple command line tool, directly through the REST API or by using third-party tools and integrations.

Incus was started as community fork of Canonical’s LXD. Now, it’s led and maintained by much of the same people that once created LXD.

Step 1: Install Incus

Incus is available in Zabbly repository maintained by the software developer. So far, it supports Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 12 and Debian 11.

To install it, first open terminal from system start menu or Gnome activities overview screen. Ubuntu users can simply press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard.

In Howtos container, incus

How to Install Python 3.13 Stable in Ubuntu 24.04 / 22.04

Last updated: October 9, 2024 — 1 Comment

This simple tutorial shows how to install Python 3.13 in Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and/or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Python 3.13.0 was released on Oct 7, 2024 as the new major release that features new interactive interpreter, that supports multi-line editing, REPL-specific commands such as help, exit, clear, and quit, interactive help, history browsing, and ‘paste mode’ for pasting larger blocks of code.

CPython now has experimental support for free-threaded mode for running threads in parallel on available CPU cores, though disabled by default.

Other changes in Python 3.13.0 include:

New interactive interpreter, features multi-line editing and color support, as well as colorized exception tracebacks.
Experimental free-threaded build mode.
A preliminary, experimental JIT.
The (cyclic) garbage collector is now incremental.
Include a modified version of mimalloc, and enabled by default if supported by the platform.
Docstrings now have their leading indentation stripped, reducing memory use and the size of .pyc files.
The dbm module has a new dbm.sqlite3 backend that is used by default when creating new files.
Support for type defaults in type parameters.
New type narrowing annotation, typing.TypeIs.
New annotation for read-only items in TypeDicts.
Removals of many deprecated modules: aifc, audioop, chunk, cgi, cgitb, crypt, imghdr, mailcap, msilib, nis, nntplib, ossaudiodev, pipes, sndhdr, spwd, sunau, telnetlib, uu, xdrlib, lib2to3.

For more, see the official release note.

In Howtos programming, python

How to Install Floorp Web Browser in Ubuntu (Step by Step)

Last updated: February 2, 2024 — 1 Comment

This is a step by step beginners guide shows how to install the Floorp web browser in Ubuntu Desktop.

Floorp is a new free open-source web browser forked from Firefox. It’s promoted as “the most Advanced and Fastest Firefox derivative”.

The browser is based on Firefox ESR. It’s updated every 4 weeks, with security updates provided before each Firefox release. It has strong tracking protection, no user tracking, flexible layout, and switchable design.

Floorp provides official Linux packages through an apt repository and Flatpak package. Advanced users can simply follow the commands in its download page. For beginners here’s a step by step screenshots as well as descriptions.

Floorp Web Browser

In Howtos floorp, web

How to Install Pale Moon with its Linux Tarball (Beginners Guide)

Last updated: February 1, 2024 — 1 Comment

This is a step by step beginners guide shows how to install Pale Moon web browser through its official Linux tarball in Ubuntu.

Pale Moon is a free open-source web browser that was started as a fork of Firefox, but now completely diverged from Firefox. It retains the highly customizable user interface, continues to support legacy add-ons and extensions, and runs in single-process mode.

The browser provides official package for Linux through a tarball, the binary package however is proprietary but NOT open-source.

This tutorial is going to show you how to install it through the tarball, though there’s an 3rd party apt repository contains the .deb package for choice.

In Howtos web

Get Firefox VA-API Hardware Acceleration working on NVIDIA GPU

Last updated: January 31, 2024 — 10 Comments

For Ubuntu machine with NVIDIA graphics card, here’s how to implement hardware acceleration for video playback in Firefox web browser.

Firefox so far only supports VA-API for GPU decoding to offload CPU and save power. Both Intel and AMD GPUs support VA-API. However, NVIDIA so far supports the api only through the open-source Nouveau driver.

If you have only NVIDIA GPU running with proprietary driver, then hardware video acceleration does not work out-of-the-box for Firefox.

For choice, there are libvdpau-va-gl1 driver (h.264 only) or libva-vdpau-driver, but both seems no longer updated. The best choice so far is the free open-source nvidia vaapi driver.
Continue Reading…

In Howtos Firefox, Hardware Acceleration, nvidia