News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
KeePassXC password manager announced the new 2.7.7 release this Sunday! Here are the new features and how to install instruction for Ubuntu.
The new KeePassXC 2.7.7 features official support for Passkeys. It’s a type of login credential, that provides a faster, easier, and more secure ways to login to websites and services without having to enter a password.
image from keepassxc website
For Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation, and other Linux with GNOME Desktop, there’s an extension to help you focus on reading on the screen.
It’s Reading Strip, a free and open-source app written in JavaScript. With it, a horizontal (and/or vertical) strip will be displayed and follow around your mouse cursor.
By settings its background color and opacity, it can highlight the sentence to help focus on reading for people affected by dyslexia.
It also supports focus strip mode, that hides (blurs) the previous and next ones on screen. Which, is great for helping children focus on reading very well.
ReadingStrip Focus mode
As mentioned above, reading strip is available as an extension for GNOME Desktop. It so far supports for GNOME from version 3.36 to 44. Sadly, GNOME 45 is not supported due to bug. Meaning it works for all current Ubuntu LTS (20.04 and 22.04), Fedora 37/38, Debian 12, RHEL 9.
For Ubuntu 22.04, first search for and install “Gnome Shell Extension Manager” from Ubuntu Software.
Install Extension Manager in Ubuntu 22.04+
Then, launch the tool and use it to search & install “Reading Strip” under Browse tab.
For Ubuntu 20.04 and other Linux with GNOME, just open web browser and go to the extension page via the link button below:
Install the browser extension if it prompts, refresh, and finally use the ON/OFF switch that page to install the GNOME Shell Extension.
NOTE: Debian and Ubuntu may also needs to open terminal and run command sudo apt install chrome-gnome-shell to install the agent package first.
After properly installed the extension, an indicator applet should appear in top-right system tray area.
By clicking on the applet icon or using Ctrl + Super (Windows Logo) + Space key combination can toggle on/off the feature.
To change the strip size, background opacity, color, and/or enable focus mode, just install either Gnome Extensions or Extension Manager from either Ubuntu Software or Gnome Software.
Then, click on setting for the Reading Strip extension and do the changes as you want.
That’s all. Enjoy!
For users who prefer native .deb package, LibreOffice 24.2 is finally available to install via Ubuntu PPA!
LibreOffice is the default office suite for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and many other Linux. And, the latest so far is LibreOffice 24.2.x release series that was released a month ago.
The office suite provides official packages for Linux through Flatpak, Snap, Deb/RPM, and AppImage.
However, for Ubuntu users who prefer the native Deb package format, the LibreOffice Fresh PPA maintained by Ubuntu Team members, is a better choice.
“OTOH, it is _way_ _better_ to use packages from this PPA than using the *.deb files that The Document Foundation provides upstream, which are intentionally build against a very old baseline for maximum compatibility. So, _if_ you want to be on the bleeding edge, do it here, not with upstream *.debs.”
And now the PPA finally is updated that contains LibreOffice 24.2.1 for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 23.10, and Ubuntu 24.04. While the Ubuntu 20.04 build is stuck at the last v7.6.5.
This tutorial shows how to disable certain CPU cores in Ubuntu to save power and prevent your machine from overheating.
There are a few tools to manage CPU frequency and save power in Linux today. They include power-profile-daemon (Gnome built-in power mode settings), TLP laptop battery life saving tool, auto-cpufreq, and more.
Besides limiting CPU frequency, turn off few CPU cores is another choice to cool down your PC or laptop. And, Motherboard BIOS settings page usually have a corresponding option. For choice, here’s how to do the job in Ubuntu Linux.
Loupe is the core image viewer app for GNOME since version 45, but it’s so far not made default in Ubuntu.
It’s a fully adaptive image viewer that supports mobile form factors. It’s touch-friendly that supports 2-finger swipe left/right to navigate, 2-finger pinch/stretch to zoom out/in, and 2-finger gestures to rotate images.
Other features of Loupe include fast GPU accelerated image rendering, tiled rendering for vector graphics, sandboxed image decoding, and more.
This tutorial shows how to use locate command to quickly find files in your Linux system.
In Ubuntu Linux, the locate command is provided by the plocate package. It’s very fast command line search tool, that can find all files in the system matching the given pattern. It rarely needs to scan through its entire database, and most I/O is done asynchronously, but the results are synchronized.
Most importantly plocate is easy to use! I regularly use it to search app icon images that are in use in most pages of this website.
This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to install OnlyOffice Desktop Editors office suite and keep it up-to-date in Ubuntu 22.04. Though the title said for Ubuntu 22.04, it also works in Linux Mint (exclude Snap) and Debian.
OnlyOffice, formerly TeamLab, is a free office suite. The Desktop Editors is offline version, that’s made up of Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation, and PDF Form. Though, it supports collaborative editing by connecting to a cloud service.
The desktop editors is free and open-source (AGPL-3.0-only license) software works in Windows, Linux, and macOS. There’ also mobile version for iOS and Android, though called OnlyOffice Documents. It’s compatible with MS Office (OOXML) and OpenDocument (ODF) formats and supports DOC, DOCX, ODT, RTF, TXT, PDF, HTML, EPUB, XPS, DjVu, XLS, XLSX, ODS, CSV, PPT, PPTX, ODP, DOTX, XLTX, POTX, OTT, OTS, OTP, and PDF-A.
The office suite is available to install in Ubuntu in 4 different ways. Choose any one that you prefer:
This is a step by step beginners guide shows how to install and setup OneDrive client in Ubuntu 22.04 to sync files between local machine and Microsoft cloud.
OneDrive is a file hosting service by Microsoft. It so far does not have an official app for Linux, but there’s a popular free open-source client works in most Linux. And, here’s the basic how to guide for installing and using it in Ubuntu Linux.
When going to download or install something that takes much disk space, it’s better to first check if there’s enough free space left in your system.
This is super easy to do the job in Ubuntu & other Linux. And, I’m going to show you how in both graphical and command line ways.
Though the title said for Ubuntu, this tutorial works in most other Linux. The graphical way may vary depends on desktop environment, but the Linux command works in most, including Debian, Fedora, Arch, openSUSE.
This simple tutorial shows how to install and use Kvantum theme engine to change themes for your Qt5 and Qt6 applications in Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 23.10.
GNOME Desktop uses GTK toolkit for its applications and KDE/LxQt uses Qt toolkit instead. These apps work on each other desktop environment, but may NOT look native.
To unify the look and feel, Fedora Qt developer team has QGnomePlatform, adwaita-qt, and QAdwaitaDecorations projects to make Qt apps look better in GNOME. So far, only QAdwaitaDecorations is in active development for implementing Adwaita-like window header and border for Qt apps.
For Qt app window color, buttons, and other components, Kvantum is good choice to do the job.
qBittorrent (Qt6) with Kvantum theme in Ubuntu
