Archives For Howtos

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.

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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.

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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. There’s also a portable Linux tarball available to in its download page. For beginners here’s a step by step screenshots as well as descriptions.

Floorp Web Browser

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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.

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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.
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GNOME introduced new core camera app in the release of version 45, which however not adopted as default in Ubuntu 23.10 or Fedora 39.

If you want to try it out, then here’s how to do the trick in Ubuntu 24.04 and/or Ubuntu 23.10, and workaround “No Camera Found” issue.

The new camera app, aka Gnome Snapshot, is written in GTK4 + Libadwaita. Compare to Cheese, it looks more modern and native in current Ubuntu and Fedora Workstation.

Image from gnome.org

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This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to install the latest version of Nginx web server (either mainline or stable) in Ubuntu 24.04 and Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop or Server. Nginx is a popular free and open-source web server, that can be also used as reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. For a just working version, user can run command sudo apt install nginx-full to install it from Ubuntu system repository, which however is always old. For the latest version, there are 2 ways to install the web server. Besides building from source, they include Ubuntu PPA and Nginx’s official repository.

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Got a CH341a series USB programmer? Here’s a graphical free I2C EEPROM programmer tool for Linux Desktop.

There are a number of programs for Windows, such as CH341Programmer, NEOProgrammer, and ASProgrammer, for working with popular “green” and “black” CH341a devices, but it lacks a graphical interface for Linux.

So, Linux IMSProg was born to provides a graphical interface to read, write, erase and test I2C, SPI and MicroWire EEPROM/Flash chips (24xxx, 25xxx, 93xxx, 95xxx series).

It’s a free open-source tool based on Qt5, that uses QHexEdit2 for hex editor widget and a modified set of the SNANDer programmer libraries.

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This simple tutorial shows how to easily make your KUbuntu desktop layout to be Ubuntu (GNOME) Style, that includes top-panel, left side-bar, and a full-screen launcher.

KDE Plasma is highly customizable. User can manually add new panel, configure its position, add panel items. But, without struggling with configurations, there’s a theme can automate the process, to make your Plasma Desktop look like Ubuntu with default GNOME desktop.


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Guvcview, the free open-source tool for capturing image/video and dynamically controlling UVC camera and webcam devices, released version 2.1.0.

It’s a GTK3 and Qt5 application that provides both graphical interface and command line options to control your webcam or camera.

With it, you can change the brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, white balance (gamma), sharpness, backlight compensation, etc settings for your webcam.

Besides the dynamic control of UVC (USB Video Class) camera/webcam, it also allows to capture video with control of frame rate, filters such as mirror, invert, pieces, blur, etc. Also, capture audio with sample rate, latency, and filters including echo, reverb, fuzz, wahwah, and ducky.

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