News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
Free open-source software updates and Linux news
Blender, the popular free open-source 3D creation software, announced new major 4.3 release this Tuesday with many exciting new features and performance improvements.
In the new release, the real-time renderer EEVEE now supports Light Linking and Shadow Linking, which was previously available only in Cycles. It now has a new Metallic BSDF node in shader editor, and, new texture node that can create procedural Gabor noise for random interleaved bands with controllable direction and width.
Linux Kernel 6.12 was released! Linus Torvalds announced on Sunday:
“No strange surprises this last week, so we’re sticking to the regular release schedule, and that obviously means that the merge window opens
tomorrow. I already have two dozen+ pull requests in my mailbox, kudos to all the early birds.But before the merge window opens, please give this a quick test to make sure we didn’t mess anything up. The shortlog below gives you the summary for the last week, and nothing really jumps out at me. A number of last-minute reverts, and some random fairly small fixes fairly spread out in the tree.”
IntelliJ IDEA 2024.3, the last major release in 2024, was released few days ago!
The release introduced new Logical code structure in the Structure tool window, allows to view classes, methods, fields, as well as links and interactions between components in your project.
K2 mode with Kotlin now it stable. With it enabled, it supports using non-local break and continue statements inside lambdas, as well as multi-dollar interpolation.
The popular free open-source Audacity audio editor announced new 3.7.0 release few days ago!
Unlike v3.5.0 or v3.6.0, this is NOT a feature release but maintenance updates with many bug-fixes and performance improvements. While, the developers are working on next major Audacity 4.0.
The new release improved contrast in the light theme. Which, fixed the issue that the focus border was hard to discern as it was blue against a blue-based background.
To not make disabled and neurodivergent people uncomfortable while they use Audacity, it renamed the word “Insane” in the Quality drop-down menu in the Export Audio dialog with “Excessive“.
It’s been more than 8 years since the last 1.3.1 stable. Clementine, the old popular music player and library organizer, finally got a new stable release!
Clementine is a free open-source music player inspired by Amarok 1.4. It provides an easy to use Qt5 user interface to play and manage large music collections, while keeping fast and lightweight.
Besides local music playback, the player also supports internet radios, such as last.fm, radio-browser.info, Subsonic. And, it can search and play you music from cloud, including Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and more.
Moreover, it provides handy tools to transcode music, open and rip audio CD. See Clementine website for more about it.
Clementine Music Player
Ubuntu 24.10, code-name “Oracular Oriole”, was officially released!
This is the latest short term release with 9 months support until July 2025. It features Linux Kernel 6.11 and GNOME Desktop 47.
And, there are official flavors feature other desktop environments, such as KUbuntu 24.10 and Ubuntu Studio 24.10 with KDE Plasma 6.1, XUbuntu 24.10 with XFCE 4.18, Ubuntu MATE 24.10 with 1.26.
Python, the popular free open-source programming language, finally announced 3.13.0 stable this Monday!
Python 3.13 introduced new interactive shell. It’s enabled by default and based on code from the PyPy project.
When you start the new shell in an interactive terminal, it uses colors by default for prompts and tracebacks and supports multi-line editing.
As well, it supports REPL-specific commands such as help, exit, and quit without call them as functions. And, I can finally use clear command in the shell to clear screen.
The new interactive shell also supports interactive help browsing using F1, history browsing using F2, and ‘paste mode’ with F3 for pasting larger blocks of code.
Just in case for those who don’t like the new shell, it can be disabled by setting environment variable. PYTHON_BASIC_REPL=1.
Python 3.13 shell, with colors, multi-line editing, etc support
The popular FFmpeg media library released new version 7.1 a few days ago. Here are the new features and Ubuntu PPA for Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04 users.
The new release of FFmpeg library added official VVC decoder support. Versatile Video Coding (VVC in short), also known as H.266, has about 50% better compression rate for the same quality compared to HEVC (aka H.265). It supports resolutions ranging from very low up to 4K, 16K, and 360° videos, as well as YCbCr 4:4:4, 4:2:2 and 4:2:0 with 8–10 bits per component, HDR, variable and fractional frame rates from 0 to 120 Hz, and more.
FFmpeg added experimental VVC decoding support since the last 7.0 version. Now, the decoder goes official and it’s compatible with DVB test content. The release also supports for decoding VVC with Intel Quick Sync Video acceleration. As well, it supports encoding VVC using libvvenc library.
MPV, the popular free open-source Linux media player, released version 0.39.0 last week. Here are the new features and Ubuntu PPA for Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04 users.
The new MPV 0.39.0 introduced Video Super Resolution scaling support with Intel and NVIDIA RTX GPUs. It’s a technology that can use your GPU to upscale low resolution video to higher resolutions. For AMD GPUs, the feature will be integrated into the FFmpeg library.
According to the official release note, the feature is implemented through the d3d11va filter, meaning that it’s Windows only. To enable it, either use vf set d3d11vpp=scale=nvidia:scale-target in your mpv.conf file or see the official documentation for the command line options.
MPV media player
The Beta release of Ubuntu 24.10, code-name Oracular Oriole, is out last night on Sep 20.
This is a short-term release with 9 months support. It so far features Linux Kernel 6.11 and GNOME 47 desktop.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary, the new release includes a “Warty Brown” accent color and new optional wallpapers in the “Appearances” settings page. There’s also an anniversary logo that you can see in the login screen.
And, the release now by default plays the original startup sound at login. While, there’s a toggle option in “Sound” settings page to turn it off.
The sound comes from the warty-startup.oga file under “/usr/share/sounds/Yaru/stereo” directory. Without logging out and back in, you may run command below in terminal to play it out:
/usr/bin/canberra-gtk-play --id="warty-startup"
Anniversary logo in login screen
