Elementary OS 0.3 Freya is out! The beautiful desktop Linux distribution is now based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, uses GTK+ 3.14 and supports UEFI.
After a few days of countdown in Elementary website, the developer team finally announced the release of Elementary OS 0.3 Freya, via a Live Youtube video. Here are some of the great new features in the Elementary OS 0.3:
Linux Kernel 3.16.
GTK+ 3.14, which will be default in Ubuntu 15.04 (Ubuntu 14.04 comes with GTK 3.10)
new, unified, app-focused design
Math calculations and Quicklist support in Application Launcher
Nitrux is a simple, clean and hand crafted icon set for GTK based environments (Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, XFCE, LXDE), KDE (Plasma, Plasma 5) and Android.
This icon theme just got a new release a few hours ago which fixed misnamed Bygfoot icon, added back Synaptic package status icons, made icon for Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Nitrux 3.5.0 also adds some new icons for:
fault milestone one
Fading Hearts
Narcissu 1st & 2nd
Sakura Spirit
Serious Sam 3:BFE
garry’s mod
Team Fortress 2
Half-Life Blue Shift
Counter Strike-Condition-Zero
Ricochet
Opposing Force
Team Fortress
and several action icons for Plasma.
Install Nitrux Icon Theme:
First grab the latest .DEB binary (nitrux-icon-theme_x.x.x_all.deb) from link below:
A new stable release of Mozilla’s web browser, Firefox 37, was released today at the end of March.
According to the release note, Firefox 37 brings a heartbeat user rating system to get user feedback about Firefox. Every day a random subset of users are offered a rating widget. After rating Firefox, an ENGAGEMENT page may open in a background tab.
Users can disable this feature by going to about:config, search browser.selfsupport.url in filter box and set value to “”.
Besides that, Firefox 37 comes with below changes:
Yandex set as default search provider for the Turkish locale
Bing search now uses HTTPS for secure searching
Improved protection against site impersonation via OneCRL centralized certificate revocation
Opportunistically encrypt HTTP traffic where the server supports HTTP/2 AltSvc
Disabled insecure TLS version fallback for site security
Extended SSL error reporting for reporting non-certificate errors
TLS False Start optimization now requires a cipher suite using AEAD construction
Improved certificate and TLS communication security by removing support for DSA
Improved performance of WebGL rendering on Windows
Implemented a subset of the Media Source Extensions (MSE) API to allow native HTML5 playback on YouTube (Windows only)
The 3.2 release of Rhythmbox, Ubuntu’s default music player, was announced just a few hours ago with some new features, bug fixes and translation updates.
According the the changelog, Rhythmbox 3.2 brings a Soundcloud plugin, support for disc and track total tags, ability to clear, re-fetch and manually set cover art using the song info window.
There are also some bugs has been fixed in the new release:
same songs played after reading a playlist
no easy way to unselect the browse by album,artist,genre option
Unclear string “in” for translation
rhythmbox skips one or two songs after playing certain songs
configure warning: ‘INCLUDES’ is the old name for ‘AM_CPPFLAGS’ (or ‘*_CPPFLAGS’)
Add track count and disc count to the database
data: Add Vorbis aliases as supported mime-types
Failure to build with tdb 1.3
Crash when right clicking the track list in the library
Rhythmbox fails to import MP3 files with ID3 v2.4 tags created by PicardQT
Tracks with no embedded covert art show a random cover art from the music collection
Right click on any file in ‘Tracks list’ clashes the application
Duplicate symbol _rb_metadata_iface_xml
gdkx.h explicitly included; prevents building on Mac
symbolic icon is broken
How to upgrade to Rhythmbox 3.2 in Ubuntu:
The new release is available in fossfreedom’s PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 15.04, and Linux Mint 17.
1. First open terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run below command to add the PPA:
The beta 2 release of Ubuntu 15.04 Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products was announced today, codenamed “Vivid Vervet”.
Ubuntu 15.04 comes with Linux Kernel 3.19. The default desktop Unity 7.3 brings many bug-fixes and locally integrated menus for unfocused windows. This release also ships Compiz Window Manager 0.9.12 with Nvidia fixes, fully MATE desktop support.
Before Ubuntu 15.04 final to be released on April 23, there will be also a RC release on April 16.
Download Ubuntu 15.04:
This beta release includes images from not only the Ubuntu Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products, but also the Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu Studio, Xubuntu, and a new official flavor Ubuntu MATE.
The latest stable Opera browser for Linux has reached the 28 release. The new release features bookmark synchronization on all devices.
Opera team recently announced the bookmark syncing feature by releasing the Opera Stable 28, which is available on Opera for computers, Opera Mini for iOS and Opera for Android. To use this feature, you need an Opera Account and login from either Setting page or the little figure icon.
In addition, Opera 28 also brings:
a better integration with Mac OS, as “vibrancy” of the address field and improved Mac fullscreen mode have been added
If you have an previous Opera release installed, the Opera Stable Repository should be added on your system. (Go to Software & Updates -> Other Software tab, and check it out)
Then you can upgrade Opera through Software Updater after checking for updates.
The open source video transcoder Handbrake 0.10.1 was released recently with various fixes. The developers are working on the next major release Handbrake 1.0.
In an attempt to move away from our yearly release cycle, we have decided to start publishing interim fix releases. 0.10.1 marks the first of these releases. It’s focus is to fix some common bugs rather than introduce the new features we are working on in the background for 1.0.
Release highlights in Handbrake 0.10.1:
Various bug fixes for all platforms and the core engine.
Updated x265 to 1.5 which brings numerous bug fixes and some performance improvements.
Install or Upgrade to Handbrake 0.10.1 in Ubuntu:
The developer has made the binaries into PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10, and/or Linux Mint 17/17.1.
To add the PPA, open terminal from the Dash or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run:
The second point release of Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr LTS (Long-Term Support) is out today with security fixes, newer kernel (3.16) and X support.
Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS includes Linux Kernel 3.16 and an updated version of the Xorg display server from the Utopic 14.10 release. These newer enablement stacks are meant for desktop and server use only, and not recommended for cloud or virtual images.
Linux Kernel 3.16 was released in August 2014. It features 64-bit ARM EFI stub support, new Synaptics input driver, initial GK20A support, and more. See this article for details.
Download:
To download the .iso files of Ubuntu 14.04.2 and its flavors, go to:
For Ubuntu 14.04 and/or 14.04.1 users, just install all the system updates via Software Updater or run below commands one by one in a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
For the Kernel 3.16 and updated X stack, you have to install below packages manually by running command:
Sigil, a free and open-source EPUB e-books editor, gets a big update recently by releasing version 0.8.3 and 0.8.4 one day after.
One of the big changes is that now Qt 5.4.0 is the minimum required version for building Sigil. Since Qt 5.4.0 fixed the macdeployqt application and even integrated code signing, Mac OS X (>= 10.9.5) users no longer need to disable gatekeeper.
But for Ubuntu, this may not be good news since Ubuntu repositories still provide Qt 5.2 for 14.04 and Qt 5.3 for 14.10 (and 15.04). Users need to manually download & install Qt 5.4.0+ and compile Sigil from the source tarball.
Sigil release notes, binary packages for Windows & Mac, and source code are available at github.com.
For Ubuntu user, besides building the latest Sigil 0.8.4 source code as well as Qt 5.4.0 manually, the old 0.8.2 release can be easily installed from a third-party PPA(run below commands one by one or grab the .deb from link page).
Mozilla Firefox has reached the 35 release which brings improved “Hello” video chat tool, built-in support for H.264 on OS X via native APIs, improved high quality image resizing performance, support for the CSS Font Loading API, updated PDF.js, and numerous other changes.
Firefox Hello with new rooms-based conversations model
New search UI improved and enabled for more locales
Access the Firefox Marketplace from the Tools menu and optional toolbar button
Built-in support for H264 (MP4) on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) and newer through native APIs
Use tiled rendering on OS X
Improved high quality image resizing performance
Improved handling of dynamic styling changes to increase responsiveness
Implemented HTTP Public Key Pinning Extension (for enhanced authentication of encrypted connections)
Added support for the CSS Font Loading API
Resource Timing API implemented
CSS filters enabled by default
Changed JavaScript ‘let’ semantics to match the ES6 specification
Support for inspecting ::before and ::after pseudo elements
Computed view: Nodes matching the hovered selector are now highlighted
Network Monitor: New request/response headers view (more info)
Added support for the EXT_blend_minmax WebGL extension
Show DOM Properties context menu item in inspector
Reduced resource usage for scaled images
PDF.js updated to version 1.0.907
Non-HTTP(S) XHR now returns correct status code
Various security fixes
Upgrade Firefox in Ubuntu:
For Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04, and Ubuntu 14.10, Firefox 35 will be soon made into the official Ubuntu repositories, available for upgrade through the Software Updater:
