News | UbuntuHandbook

Virus Scanner ClamTk 5.02 released, Install in Ubuntu

Last updated: December 30, 2013

ClamTk, a GUI front-end for ClamAV Virus Scanner recently released version 5.02. This release brings a little UI improvements, bug fixes as well as translation updates. See the changelog:

Add gnome-icon-theme to requirements (mostly affects KDE-based systems like Kubuntu; it’s pretty standard with most distros)
Update statusbar after saving update preferences
Add missing icon in Nautilus context menu
Remove unused (notify-send and more) code from App.pm
Ensure FileChooserButton cannot be clicked with nothing (due to inability to reset)
Remove deprecated encoding pragma.
Updated language files: Bulgarian (bg), Czech (cs), Slovak (sk), Chinese (zh_CN), Irish (ga)

Download & Install ClamTk:

For Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint user:

ClamTk main package

thunar-sendto-clamtk (Xfce Thunar plugin)

clamtk-kde (KDE Dolphin plugin)

nemo-sendto-clamtk (Linux Mint Nemo plugin)

NOTE: previous packages only work for Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 14.04 and higher. For Ubuntu 12.04, install ClamTk 5.00

For Fedora, CentOS, Source Tarball, go to ClamTk googlecode page

In News ClamAV, ClamTk, Virus scanner

Cloud Music Player ‘Nuvola’ Seems to Be Active Again

Last updated: December 28, 2013

Nuvola Player, app that integrates Google Music, Bandcamp, Deezer, Grooveshark, Hype Machine, 8tracks, Pandora, Rdio and Amazon Cloud Player with Linux desktop recently released version 2.3.0.

As you may know, the developer has announced that Nuvola Player is discontinued until a new developer is found or a funding goal ($59.00 per week) for the current maintainer is reached. Now, the developer receives $60 per week and Nuvola Player seems to be active again!

What’s New in Nuvola Player 2.3.0:

Service updates manager, which can be used to download and install updates of service integrations providing hot fixes for breakages caused by sudden changes in a web interface of streaming services. Purpose of these updated is to provide these fixes faster without waiting for new Nuvola Player release.

Detection of Flash plugin and GStreamer issues has been improved with links to the new help site. JavaScript API was given methods to check format support and version was increased to 2.2.

Google Play 4.4: fixed sandbox pattern to enable Flash object for playback.

Added donation bar.

Updated VAPI files and added libnotify.vapi from Vala 0.22.1 tarball to fix build error.
Google Play 4.5: Fix next/previous action broken by a recent web app update.

Install Nuvola Player:

The PPA is ready for Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 12.10. Press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal and run commands below one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nuvola-player-builders/stable

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install nuvolaplayer

Nuvola Player Homepage

In News Nuvola Cloud Player

Security – Ubuntu Stores You Wi-Fi Password in Clear Text

Last updated: December 27, 2013

A user has pointed out on the mailing list that the Wi-Fi passwords in Ubuntu are not encrypted because they are stored in a folder outside of Home, which can be encrypted during the installation of the operating system.

I recently stumbled over the fact, that NetworkManager by default stores Wifi profiles *including clear text passwords* under ‘/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/’.

I think that is not what one expects when he/she turns on home folder encryption and should because of that be corrected somehow.

If you’re using the default Wi-Fi settings in Ubuntu Linux, open Nautilus file browser with root (Press Alt+F2 -> type gksudo nautilus, hit enter). Then you’ll see list of available Wi-Fi connections under Computer -> etc -> NetworkManager -> system-connections

The password is shown as clear text in your Wi-Fi connection file.

A Ubuntu developer has explained that this issue is caused by the fact that the option “All users may connect to this network” is enabled by default. Which means, untick “All users may connect to this network.” under network indicator -> Edit connections -> Select network -> Click edit -> General tab will fix this issue.

softpedia

In News WiFi Security

KDE Audio Converter CD Ripper soundKonverter 2.0.5 & 2.0.90 released

Last updated: December 22, 2013

SoundKonverter, the KDE audio converter, Replay Gain tool and CD ripper now is at version 2.0.5 and 2.0.90 (2.1.0 rc1).

According to the changelog, soundKonverter 2.0.5 added Catalan, Swedish, Chinese (Taiwan), and Romanian translations. 2.0.90 added following new features:

Hide main window when started with –replaygain argument
Option to eject CD after ripping has been completed (enabled by default)
New space holder for the “meta data” naming mode that contains the source directory
Configuration options for cdparanoia
icedax ripper plugin
Copy album artist tags
Remember last folder for add files/directory/playlist dialogs
Add symlinked files to file list

SoundKonverter Features:

Convert audio files between many formats
Change sample rate and sample size during conversion
Apply effects like normalize during conversion
Convert the audio stream from video files to audio files
Convert multiple files at once
Calculate Replay Gain for many formats
Replay Gain tool for calculating and removing Replay Gain tags
Calculate Replay Gain for multiple files or file stets at once
Conversion and Replay Gain calculation is very scalable, the conversion of 10000 files or more is not a problem
Copy tags and covers when converting files (note: for ogg/METADATA_BLOCK_PICTURE, flac and asf/wma files, taglib 1.7 or higher is needed)
Rip multiple audio CDs at once
Retrieve audio CD information from CDDB and MusicBrainz
Easy to use, just choose a file format and a quality level
Detailed control, if you want to choose the conversion settings in more detail, simply switch to the “detailed” tab
Manage your preferred conversion options with profiles
Contextual help, e.g. if you don’t know what the speex format is, just click on the “info” button next to it.
Or if you want to add a file that isn’t supported, soundKonverter will tell you how to enable the format if possible.
Possibility to configure which backend shall be used for which codec – or let soundKonverter optimize that for you.
Every time you install or remove backends soundKonverter will suggest optimizations if possible.
Possibility to integrate soundKonverter in other applications or scripts by using its command line interface
Data recovery in case of a crash

Install SoundKonverter in Ubuntu Linux:

The installers for CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, RedHat, OpenSuse, Ubuntu are available in this page.

For Ubuntu users, use the Deb package for xUbuntu 12.04 which works good in my Ubuntu 13.10 64 bit machine.

In News CD ripper, KDE audio converter, Replay Gain tool

FrostWire 5.6.9 Gets Faster Cloud Search & Memory Optimizations

Last updated: December 9, 2013

FrostWire, a free and open source BitTorrent client recently released v5.6.9 with big improvements. See the changelog:

Insanely faster cloud search results.
Significant memory optimizations on search result parsing and display.
Removed jDownloader libraries, less complexity, lighter app.
Cloud audio downloads are much smaller, no audio demuxing necessary from video services.
Cloud video DASH download support.
Smarter playlist name suggestion algorithm takes into account ID3 tags.
Fixes bug where new playlists wouldn’t be saved if default name was used.

If you use Frostwire on Ubuntu Linux as your Bittorrent client, it’s strongly recommended to upgrade to this release. To do so, just go to the official webpage, download and install the the DEB package.

In News frostwire

Xfce4 Whisker Menu updates with fixes & improvements [PPA]

Last updated: November 20, 2013

The Whisker Menu for Xfce recently released version 1.2.1 with bug fixes and improvements.

As you may know, Whisker Menu is an alternate application launcher for Xfce. With it, you can browser, search, and marked as favorites through all of your installed applications. Changes in version 1.2.1:

Fix incorrect comparison for checking icon sizes
Add window title to allow identifying menu window
Add tips to README for popup script and compiz workaround
Improve build system files
Translation updates: Asturian, Catalan, Chinese (Taiwan), Czech, German, Estonian, French, Hungarian, Indonesian, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish

whisker menu in Ubuntu 13.10 Xfce4

For Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.10, Ubuntu 12.04, Linux Mint and their derivatives you can easily install or upgrade to this release by running commands below one by one in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gottcode/gcppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin

For Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, Debian, Fedora, and other Linux, get the Whisker Menu from its website

In News Whisker Menu, xfce4

TORCS 1.3.5 released with a new 4 speed stock car added

Last updated: November 17, 2013

TORCS, The Open Racing Car Simulator recently released versiono 1.3.5. The most important changes in 1.3.5 are:

the ability to modify/store/load car setups during practice and qualifying sessions (screen reachable when you hit escape, “Car Setup, Restart” or during a pit stop, “Setup”)
improved content (totally reworked racetrack e-track-2, improved e-track-6 and wheel-2)
the ability of robots to change the car setup during a pit stop
new Robottools API calls for handling car setups
improvements to the simulation engine (1.5 way LSD, third element)
adjustments to the car categories and physical models
a new 4 speed stock car and category
improvements to the TORCS Racing Board
many little improvements and bug fixes.

Full lists of changes can be found at Torcs 1.3.5 release note

So far, the only way to get Torcs 1.3.5 running on Ubuntu is build from the source code.

Or you can install the old version from Ubuntu Software Center.

In News Open Racing Car Simulator, TORCS

BleachBit 1.0 released, Download Link for WIndows & Linux include

Last updated: November 17, 2013

BleachBit, the disk space cleaner & privacy manager recently released version 1.0. It makes it easier to shred any file; adds three cleaners; improves cleaners for Google Chrome and Adobe Flash; has a digitally signed installer for Windows; and more.

These are the changes since version 0.9.6:

The command line option –shred now shreds arbitrary files.
Add Octave cleaner
Add Warzone 2100 cleaner
Clean recently played in VLC (thanks to nolme/Vincent DUVERNET – Nolmë Informatique)
Google Chrome: Fix errors “Favicons is version 26” and “DatabaseError: no such column: full_path”
Google Chrome: delete more cache
Remove auto-hide option. (Before, it was a default.)
Specific to Linux
- Coming soon: .deb package for Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander).
- Coming soon: .rpm package for openSUSE 11.4.
- Add SQLite3 cleaner
- Adobe Flash: clean NativeCache
Specific to Windows
- The BleachBit executable and Windows installer are cryptographically signed, so you are sure no one has tampered with them. Windows should NOT give you the unknown publisher warning.
- Register verb (shortcut menu item) for shredding files.
- When updating winapp2.ini, automatically load changes without GUI restart
- Delete more system logs
- Clean more Adobe Flash
- Fix error “The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process” when cleaning .ini with overwrite.

For more details, see official announcement.

For Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.04, OpenSuse, Fedora, Debian, CentOS installers and Windows EXE are available in official download page.

In News BleachBit, Disk space cleaner

Cinelerra 4.5 Released, Install it in Ubuntu or Linux Mint

Last updated: October 27, 2013

Cinelerra, a professional video editing and compositing software designed for the GNU/Linux now reached v4.5. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy, Ubuntu 13.04 Raring, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise, Ubuntu 12.10 and Linux Mint.

What’s New in Cinelerra 4.5:

Speed curves mainly for video & in degraded quality for audio.
Some control over whether automation follows edits.
Ability to transfer keyframes between audio and video tracks.
Motion temporaries are stored in /tmp/m and /tmp/r files.
Time Avg clears the accumulator on keyframes.

Install Cinelerra 4.5:

The DEB installer for Ubuntu is available at this page. Download & installed the cinelerra-data_4.5-dmo1_all.deb & cinelerra_4.5-dmo1_amd64 (or i386).deb

You can also download and build the source code.

If you’d like to install Cinelerra CV (community version of Cinelerra which adds new enhancements to the official source code.), run commands below in terminal one by one (Ctrl+Alt+T):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cinelerra-ppa/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install cinelerra-cv

In News cinelerra, Ubuntu 13.10

Kid3 3.0 added command-line interface and GStreamer 1.0 support

Last updated: October 24, 2013

Kid3 Audio Tag Editor has reached v3.0 with new features and improvements. It adds command-line interface kid3-cli and supports GStreamer 1.0.

If you want to easily tag multiple MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, FLAC, MPC, MP4/AAC, MP2, Opus, Speex, TrueAudio, WavPack and WMA files (e.g. full albums) without typing the same information again and again and have control over both ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags, then Kid3 is the program you are looking for.

With Kid3 you can:

Edit ID3v1.1 tags
Edit all ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 frames
Convert between ID3v1.1, ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 tags
Edit tags in MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, FLAC, MPC, MP4/AAC, MP2, Speex, TrueAudio, WavPack, WMA, AIFF and WAV files
Edit tags of multiple files, e.g. the artist, album, year and genre of all files of an album typically have the same values and can be set together.
Generate tags from filenames
Generate tags from the contents of tag fields
Generate filenames from tags
Rename and create directories from tags
Generate playlist files
Automatically convert upper and lower case and replace strings
Import from freedb2.org, MusicBrainz, Discogs, Amazon and other sources of album data
Export tags as CSV, HTML, playlists, Kover XML and in other formats