Initial support for having multiple accounts per publishing service
HiDPI support for photo viewer and tools
Support MXF files
Support .nomedia files when importing from folder
For more changes in Shotwell 0.32.0, see the NEWS file in gitlab project page.
How to Install Shotwell 0.32.0 in Ubuntu
The developer team offers official Linux package via Flatpak. However, it’s not updated at the moment of writing this tutorial. See Shotwell in Flathub.
For those who prefer the classic .deb, I’ve uploaded the package into this unofficial PPA for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 22.10, and Ubuntu 23.04. Due to minimum dependency version mis-match, Ubuntu 20.04 is not supported.
1. First, search for and open terminal from your system application menu, or press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run command to add the PPA:
Type user password (no asterisk feedback) when it asks and hit Enter to continue.
2. Next, launch Software Updater (Update Manager), then install the updates for the software package.
Or, run command in terminal to install/upgrade the Shotwell package:
sudo apt install shotwell
NOTE: Linux Mint user may need to run sudo apt update first to refresh package cache.
Finally, either right-click on your photo images to select open with the photo manager, or search for and launch shotwell from ‘Activities’ overview and enjoy!
Uninstall Shotwell 0.32.0
For any issue, it’s recommended to purge the Ubuntu PPA. Which, will remove PPA and downgrade shotwell to the pre-installed version.
To do so, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command:
The Audacity audio tag editor announced the new 3.3.0 release. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and Ubuntu 23.04.
Audacity 3.3.0 is a new major release that features initial version of Beats and Measures. Some built-in effects (such as, Bass & Treble, Distortion, Phaser, Reverb and Wahwah) are now realtime capable.
The new release also added “Shelf Filter” function which is vailable in ‘Effect -> EQ and Filters’ menu.
Then, right-click on the AppImage in file manager, go to “Properties” and enable ‘allow executing file as program‘ under Permissions tab. Finally, click run the AppImage to launch Audacity audio editor.
Ubuntu 22.04 and higher does not support AppImage out-of-the-box, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard and run command to enable it:
sudo apt install libfuse2
And, if you want to create app shortcut for this AppImage package, here’s an application to automate the process.
Option 2: Flatpak
Audacity is also available to install as Flatpak package, though it’s not updated at the moment of writing.
1. First, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, make sure Flatpak support enabled by running command:
sudo apt install flatpak
NOTE: Ubuntu 18.04 needs to add this Ubuntu PPA first before running the command above.
2. Then, just run the single command to install Audacity as Flatpak package:
This simple tutorial shows how to install Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.5.5 in Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and most other Linux.
Adobe has discontinued Linux support for its Acrobat PDF reader for many years! There are now many free open-source Linux apps for reading and/or editing PDF files.
However, if you like, the old Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.5.5 is still can be installed in current Ubuntu and other Linux, though it’s unmaintained and may contain security vulnerabilities.
NOTE: Adobe Reader 9.5.5 discontinued in 2013, it may have bugs and security issues! Install and use it at your own risk!
Thanks to @Ray Schumacher (see the comment below), Adobe website still provide native .deb package for the v9.5.5 version. It did install in my case in Ubuntu 24.04, however refused to launch due to the error below:
/opt/Adobe/Reader9/Reader/intellinux/bin/acroread: error while loading shared libraries: libgdk_pixbuf_xlib-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
The libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-0:i386 package offers the missing library, but it somehow refused to install in my test. So, this tutorial shows you how to install the Flatpak package instead, which works in all current Ubuntu releases, Fedora, Debian, Arch, and most other Linux.
Install Abode Reader 9.5.5 via Flatpak package
Flatpak is an universal Linux package format that runs in sandbox environment. It takes more disk space due to shared run-time libraries, however can be more safe since it runs in container.
1. Enable Flatpak Support
Ubuntu does NOT support Flatpak out-of-the-box, due to favor of Snap. It’s however easy to add it support by doing the steps below one by one.
1. (Ubuntu 16.04|18.04 only) For the old Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. And, run command to add the Flatpak official PPA.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flatpak/stable
Then, update system package cache via:
sudo apt update
2. Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When terminal opens, run command to enable Flatpak support:
sudo apt install flatpak
For other Linux, follow this official setup guide instead for Flatpak support.
2. Install Adobe Reader Flatpak package
Once you got the file format support, then run the command below to install the Flatpak app package:
Flatpak runs in sandbox. Though, the PDF reader itself only takes 59 MB, it needs also download & install hundred of MB run-time libraries.
Once installed, either right-click on your PDF file and select “Open With Other Application” to choose Adobe Reader, or just search for and launch it from the overview screen.
NOTE: If this is the first app installed as Flatpak package in your system, you may need to log out and back in to make app icon visible.
3. Add Printer Support & Grant other Permissions
As mentioned, the Flatpak package runs in sandbox environment, which has NO permission by default to access printing system.
To enable this feature, first, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command to install Flatseal app:
Then, launch the “Flatseal” app, navigate to “Adobe Reader” in left pane of the pop-up app window, finally scroll down in right, find-out and turn on the toggle option for “Printing system”.
NOTE: If you intent to use network printer, then you also need to enable “Network” toggle option for this app package.
Uninstall Adobe Reader
To remove the software package, also open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command:
flatpak uninstall --delete-data com.adobe.Reader
You may also run command to remove unused runtime libraries to free up disk space.
KDE’s Kdenlive video editor has released version 23.04, here are the new features and how to install guide for (K)Ubuntu 22.04 & (K)Ubuntu 22.10 via PPA.
According to the KDE Gear 23.04 release note, Kdenlive 23.04 features new nested timelines.
The new feature allows user to select several video clips from tracks, and use right-click menu option “Create sequence from selection” to group them together as one single sequence. User can then edit the sequence, apply effects, and add transitions between nested and regular clips.
For more about Kdenlive 23.04, see the official release note which will be available soon tomorrow.
How to Install Kdenlive 23.04 in Ubuntu
The official PPA has built the new release package for Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 22.10, though it somehow does not support Ubuntu 23.04 yet.
1. First press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal, or search for and launch ‘Konsole‘ from start menu. When it opens, run command:
Type user password (no asterisk feedback) when it asks and hit Enter to continue.
2. After adding PPA, user can either open Software Updater (or Update Manager) to update the software package from an installed version:
Or run the command below to install or update the video editor:
sudo apt install kdenlive
NOTE: Linux Mint user has to run sudo apt update first to manually refresh package cache
And, if you got overwriting files issue due to the old dependencies: libmlt-data and melt, run command to remove them and then re-run the apt command above:
sudo dpkg -r melt libmlt-data
Once installed, press Super (Windows logo key) to open ‘Activities’ overview or start menu, and search for and open Kdenlive.
Uninstall Kdenlive
To remove Kdenlive, either use your system package manager or run the command below in a terminal window:
sudo apt remove --autoremove kdenlive
And remove the Ubuntu PPA either by running command in terminal:
Since Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster, the default system fonts for the texts in system menus, documents, and app windows have been changed.
The new font is slim. And, I’ve written a tutorial about how to try it out in Ubuntu 22.04 and 20.04. If you prefer the old one, here’s how to revert it back in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
Compare to Ubuntu 23.04/23.10, the new font in Ubuntu 24.04 looks better now in my opinion. Because, the default fonts have been changed:
from ‘Ubuntu Regular‘ to ‘Ubuntu Sans‘ for interface text.
from ‘Ubuntu Mono Regular‘ to ‘Ubuntu Sans Mono‘ for monospace text.
Default fonts changed in Ubuntu 24.04
Install old Ubuntu Fonts in Ubuntu 24.04
1. Install the classic font
Since Ubuntu 23.10, a new package fonts-ubuntu-classic is available in system repository for those who prefer the classic font.
To install the package, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open up a terminal window. Then, run command:
sudo apt install fonts-ubuntu-classic
You may run sudo apt update to refresh system package cache first if the command above somehow does not work for you.
After installing the classic fonts, text in terminal may become un-readable. In the case, just log out and back in.
2. Download & install classic font for Console (Optional)
The classic font for console (terminal) so far is NOT available in Ubuntu 24.04 repository. For choice, you may manually download and install the package for Ubuntu 22.04.
To do so, launch a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T), and download the classic font for console package via command:
Option 1: Use Gnome Tweaks to apply classic fonts:
After installed the classic fonts, it won’t apply automatically, because the default font names have changed as mentioned.
To switch back the old ones, first search for and install GNOME Tweaks from App Center.
Next, launch Gnome Tweaks, and in the first “Fonts” tab:
Select Ubuntu Regular as Interface Text font. It will be displayed as ‘Ubuntu’ after selection.
And select Ubuntu Mono Regular for Monospace Text, if you also installed the classic font for console.
Option 2: use Linux commands to apply the classic fonts
For those who are OK with Linux commands, open up a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run the commands below one by one instead:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface font-name "Ubuntu 11"
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface monospace-font-name "Ubuntu Mono 13"
Lock & Prevent updating to new fonts
To prevent your system from automatically updating to the new fonts, you have to lock the old fonts packages that were just installed via the previous step.
Thanks to @Alex Farran, lock package version via Synaptic package manager only prevents itself and ‘Software Updater’ from upgrading the package. However, apt command and may be other tools can still upgrade the fonts. So, the best choice can be running the command below in terminal:
sudo apt-mark hold fonts-ubuntu fonts-ubuntu-console
For the graphical way (NOT work for apt), first open App Center, search for and install Synatic Package Manager.
Then launch “Synaptic”, click “Search” and search “fonts-ubuntu“. Finally, do:
Press and hold Ctrl then highlight both “fonts-ubuntu” and “fonts-ubuntu-console” packages.
Go to menu “Package -> Lock Version”.
How to go back the new Ubuntu Fonts
First, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command to unlock the font packages:
Ubuntu 23.04 has been released! Besides installing from new .iso image, here’s a step by step guide shows how to upgrade from Ubuntu 22.10.
NOTE: The Upgrade process may fail! So it’s HIGHLY recommended to backup your important data first!! And, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS can even follow this tutorial twice to upgrade to 22.10 first, and then to 23.04.
Before getting started:
Backup! Backup! Backup! The most important thing to do first is to backup your important data! The upgrade process could fail due to various reasons, such as power interruption, network issue, or even poor software packages on your system.
1. Before getting started, search for and open “Software & Updates” utility. When it opens, navigate to “Other Software” tab, then disable or remove all third-party PPAs.
2. Also, in “Software & Updates” utility, navigate to “Additional Drivers” tab. Then, select and apply open-source driver, if a proprietary driver is in use.
3. In “Software & Updates“, switch to “Updates” tab. Then, select “For any new version” for “Notify me of a new Ubuntu version” drop-down box.
4. Also, search for and launch “Extension Manager” or “Gnome Extensions” app depends on which one you installed, and disable all user-installed Gnome Shell Extensions to avoid compatibility issues.
Upgrade to Ubuntu 23.04
Now, search for and open “Software Updater” from either overview or ‘Show Applications’ screen. When it opens, install all available package updates.
When done, restart your computer if it prompts to.
Finally, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. And, run command to start software updater and check distribution upgrade!
update-manager -c
If all package updates are properly installed, and useless packages removed, then it should prompt that Ubuntu 23.04 is available.
Just click on “Upgrade” button. Then it will open the release note dialog for Ubuntu 23.04. In my case, it shows a blank page, though it’s not a big deal.
Click “Upgrade” button again. Then it opens the wizard to download and setup the software sources.
When done “Setting new software channels”, it will ask for confirm again.Before clicking “Start Upgrade” button, it’s the last chance to cancel the upgrading the process!
Once you clicked “Start Upgrade” button, it starts downloading and installing all required packages. It can take quite a few minutes depends on your network speed and computer specs.
Before “Cleaning up”, you need to do one more mouse click to confirm.
If everything’s going well, it will ask to restart computer when done.
After all, verify your Ubuntu edition, either by opening “Settings” and navigate to ‘About’ page, or run command in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):
The Ubuntu Team announced the Ubuntu 23.04 yesterday!
Ubuntu 23.04, code-name “Lunar Lobster”, is a short term release with 9-month support until January 2024.
The release is powered by the latest Linux Kernel 6.2. The Ubuntu Kernel supports for building and running external kernel modules using Rust programming language.
The desktop edition features GNOME 44, with following changes:
“background apps” section (only for flatpak apps) in top-right system menu.
Bigger avatar icon and bold username in login/lock screen.
Save image link and paste into new file in Nautilus.
The release also introduced new installer. It’s a flutter app that has a fast response and modern look and feel. The old installer is still available in case of issues with the new installer.
Lunar new installer wizard
Other changes in Ubuntu 23.04 include:
Support for Intel Arc graphics DG2/Alchemist
New Intel TDX guest driver
Support for Sony DualShock 4 gamepads
OpenJDK v17, .NET 7, Python 3.11, go language 1.20, Rust 1.67, Ruby 3.1.
New default fonts.
LibreOffice is now available on RISC-V
Support for enterprise proxy, app confinement and network shares
For cloud, loT, and other images, go to the official download page.
Ubuntu 22.10 users can now upgrade to Ubuntu 23.04. Just install all available updates via “Software Updater“, restart if asked, and finally run update-manager -c command to check distribution upgrades.
This simple tutorial shows how to install or completely remove the XFCE4 desktop environment in Ubuntu 22.04 and/or Ubuntu 24.04.
XFCE4 is lightweight Linux desktop environment aims to be fast and low on system resources. To try it out, I’d recommend to install XUbuntu, Linux Mint, Linux Lite or other Linux with XFCE4 as default.
But for lazy men who don’t want to backup personal data, re-install and re-configure favorite applications again and again, install XFCE4 Desktop on top of the current Ubuntu system is a good choice. And, here’s how to do the job step by step.
Install XFCE4/XUbuntu Desktop in Ubuntu
1. First, open terminal either by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard, or by searching from ‘Activities’ overview.
2. When terminal opens, it’s recommended to first run command to update your system package index:
sudo apt update
3 Then, either install XFCE4 desktop, and core apps without changing startup animation, login screen, etc.
sudo apt install xfce4
As you can see in the screenshot, the installation only takes 88.5 MB (126 MB for 24.04) disk space in my case.
Or, install the whole XUbuntu Desktop environment, to make your Ubuntu just look like XUbuntu
sudo apt install xubuntu-desktop
Though, it will install more packages and takes 550 MB (905 MB for 24.04) disk space in my case.
In the case, it also asks to choose which login screen interface to use (Display Manager). Either choose gdm3 to keep original login screen, or use lightdm to switch to the one that is default in XUbuntu. Finally, hit Tab to highlight OK and hit Enter.
Log in XFCE4 Desktop
After installation, restart your computer!
Depends on which display manager you chose in previous step, either select your user and choose “Xfce Session” via the bottom right gear button menu.
Or, directly choose user and type password to login, if you selected lightdm display manager.
After login, you may want to tweak something. In my case, I’d like to right-click on top-panel and go to “Panel -> Add New Items”, then add Whisker Menu to replace the default application menu. In case you don’t see the widget in the list, run command to install it:
sudo apt install xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin
How to Completely Remove XFCE4/XUbuntu Desktop
1. If you installed the ‘xubuntu-desktop’ package and replaced the login screen, open terminal and run command to open the configuration again and choose “gdm3” to restore the original login screen:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm
2. Also, to restore the original startup animation screen, run command:
This command will remove the most packages installed along with ‘xfce4’ or ‘xubuntu-desktop’ package. However, it’s recommended to keep an eye on terminal output to see which packages it’s going to remove, before typing ‘y’ to confirm.
digiKam, the popular KDE photo management software, released new major 8.0.0 version! Here are the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu users.
digiKam 8.0.0 is a big release after two year of development. It features new online documentation that is well written with plenty of screenshots and screencasts. An EPUB is also available for offline use.
Image support has been greatly improved in this release. It added support for 16-bit float (half float) images in the TIFF Loader, and JPEG-XL, WEBP, and AVIF export settings everywhere.
Other changes include new OCR over scanned text via Tesseract engine, and:
Port to Qt6, and still compatible with Qt 5.15 LTS.
Spell-checking in the captions/information/properties edit-text widgets
Add convert to lossless JPEG-XL, WEBP, and AVIF while importing from camera.
Add JPEG-XL, WEBP, and AVIF converters in Batch Queue Manager.
Database search by the number of face regions or without face regions.
New option to write metadata to files with ExifTool backend.
Add support for SQLite WAL (Write-Ahead-Logging) mode.
Update G’MIC-Qt tool to last version 3.2.2.
Phase One/Leaf IIQ-S v2 support Canon CR3 filmrolls/RawBurst Canon CRM (movie) files Tiled bit-packed (and 16-bit unpacked) DNGs (non-standard) Deflate-compressed integer DNG files are allowed Canon EOS R3, R7 and R10 Fujifilm X-H2S, X-T30 II OM System OM-1 Leica M11 Sony A7-IV (ILCE-7M4) DJI Mavic 3
How to Install digiKam 8.2.0 in Ubuntu & other Linux
The new digiKam release is available to install via both Flatpak and AppImage. Choose either one that you prefer.
Option 1: digiKam Flatpak
1. For digiKam Flatpak package, first press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run command to enable Flatpak support.
sudo apt install flatpak
2. Then, run command to install digiKam as flatpak package:
2.) Then, open the Downloads folder in your file manager. And, do following steps to launch digiKam:
Right-click on the AppImage package, and click open “Properties”.
Navigate to “Permissions” tab, and enable “Allow executing file as program”.
Close the “Properties” dialog.
Finally, right-click on AppImage, and click “Run” to launch digiKam.
Create shortcut for the digiKam AppImage
Click run the AppImage launches the digiKam software directly. If you want to add a shortcut into app launcher (search results in ‘Show Applications’ and/or ‘Activities’ overview), do following steps one by one.
1. First, it’s recommended to put the AppImage package into a certain folder for long time use. Here I chose the “.local/bin” directory.
Just, press Ctrl+H in Files, and navigate to .local -> bin (create bin folder if not exist). Then, copy or move the digiKam AppImage into this folder.
2. Then, download the logo icon from web. Just, go to its website, right-click on the logo in top-left and select “Save image as” to download the file.
Finally, rename the file to digikam.svg, and store in “.local/share/icons” (also, create the ‘icons’ sub-folder if not exist).
3. Finally, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command to create the shortcut config file:
The bluefish text editor released version 2.2.15 recently. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and Ubuntu 20.04 via PPA.
Bluefish is a powerful GTK3 text editor for web and software development. It supports many programming and markup languages, but it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites.
The development of Bluefish editor is quite slow. The new 2.2.13 was released as the latest version more than 2 years since the last. And, it’s a very minor maintenance release that features:
Greatly improved CSS syntax support.
Few user interface improvements.
Some minor improvements for the syntax highlighting
And some minor bug-fixes.
How to Install Bluefish Editor (2.2.15 Updated) in Ubuntu
The editor only provides source tarball for downloading at the sourceforge web-page.
To make it easy to install in all current Ubuntu releases, I’ve upload the software package into this unofficial PPA. And, it is built against the rules from Debian upstream.
The PPA supports Ubuntu 18.04 (stick to v2.2.14), Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, and their based systems with both x86_64 and arm64/armhf CPU architecture types.
1. First, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run command to add the PPA:
Type user password (no visual feedback) when it asks and hit Enter to continue.
2. For the old Ubuntu 18.04 and Linux Mint users, manually refresh the system package cache by running command:
sudo apt update
3. Finally, either run command to install the text editor:
sudo apt install bluefish
Or, open “Software Updater” and use the tool to upgrade the previous Bluefish package to the latest.
Uninstall or Restore Bluefish
For any issue, you can easily restore to the previous 2.2.12 (or 2.2.11 depends on your Ubuntu version), by purging the PPA repository. To do so, open terminal and run command:
