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Wine 9.0 Stable Released! How to Install it in Ubuntu

Last updated: February 11, 2024 — 2 Comments

Wine, the popular software for running Windows applications on Linux, macOS, & BSD, announced new stable 9.0 release few days ago on Tuesday.

Wine 9.0 features WoW 6.0 (Windows 32-bit on Windows 64-bit), which was experimentally supported in last 8.0 release. It allows to run 32-bit Windows applications on a purely 64-bit Unix installation, instead of inside a 32-bit Unix process. However, the features is NOT enabled by default.

The release also includes experimental Wayland graphics driver. Which is also not enabled by default, but already implements many features, such as basic window management, multiple monitors, high-DPI scaling, relative motion events, and Vulkan support.

The 9.0 release added initial support for building Wine for the ARM64EC architecture, for running Windows apps on ARM64 powered devices with native speed.

Other changes in Wine 9.0 include:

WinRT theming supports a dark theme option
Vulkan driver supports up to version 1.3.272 of the Vulkan spec.
Implement Windows Media Video (WMV) decoder DirectX Media Object (DMO)
Mono engine is updated to version 8.1.0
DLS1 and DLS2 sound font loading
The default Windows version for new prefixes is set to Windows 10.
MIDI playback in dmsynth
Indeo IV50 Video for Windows decoder
And much more! See release note for details.

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VirtualBox 7.0.14 Released with Initial RHEL 9.4 Support

Last updated: January 19, 2024 — Leave a comment

Oracle Virtualbox announced a new point release for the 7.0 series this Tuesday.

It’s VirtualBox 7.0.14, which add initial host and guest support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4, though it’s still in development stage. As well, there’s a kernel panic fix for RHEL 8.9 running as guest OS.

For Solaris Linux, the guest additions can be installed into an alternate root path, and it no longer requires to reboot after uninstalling guest additions.

For macOS as host, the release added support for newer USB storage devices, and fixed memory Leak in the VBoxIntNetSwitch process when VM was configured to use ‘Internal Networking’.

The release also include OVF import/export improvements. They include import & export virtual machines containing NVMe storage controllers, and, export a VM which contains a medium inserted into a virtual CD/DVD drive which is attached to a Virtio-SCSI controller.

In News Virtualbox

GNOME 46 Alpha is out! Better Remote Desktop & Flatpak Support

Last updated: January 14, 2024 — Leave a comment

GNOME announced the first alpha of the next 46 release few days ago on last Friday.

Let’s see what’s new in the desktop for next Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

First of all, every Gnome release has a new default wallpaper. This time, it’s a blue background embrace the rounded triangle. And, in this release GNOME backgrounds now favors JPEG-XL as a format. I don’t have any photo images in .jxl format. But it seems that Gnome now supports for setting the file format as background wallpaper.

Gnome 46

GNOME Remote Desktop now supports headless remote login via GDM, through for RDP only. And, a systemd service is introduced for single user headless setups. As well, Gnome-Control-Center and classic session are allowing to run in headless mode.

In News Gnome

Linux Mint 21.3 Released! Cinnamon 6.0 & Initial Wayland Support

Last updated: January 13, 2024 — Leave a comment

Linux Mint announced new 21.3 release, code-name “Virginia”, this Friday.

It’s the 3rd update for the Mint 21 release series, which is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and uses Kernel 5.15 LTS.

The new Linux Mint 21.3 features Cinnamon Desktop 6.0, with experimental Wayland support. Which, has been default in Ubuntu (since 22.04), Fedora Workstation, and other Linux with recent Gnome. However, there are still many applications do NOT work on wayland.

Mint Wayland session

The new desktop also features a new “Actions” page in System Settings. Like Applets, Extensions, and Desklets, it allows to add context menu (right-click menu) options to file browser & desktop, by downloading add-ons from the official cinnamon spices.
Continue Reading…

In News Linux Mint

Kodi 20.3 Released as Last Update for the “Nexus” series

Last updated: January 11, 2024 — Leave a comment

Kodi, formerly XBMC media center, released version 20.3 this Wednesday!

According to the announcements, this is the last release of the 20.x “Nexus” series. While Kodi 21 “Omega” now is in Beta 2 stage.

The release mainly includes bug-fixes and some backports. They include an assortment of fixes for Estuary, including home categories’ focus position, alignment of counter labels and Shift view for collections.

For gaming, the release fixed controllers not assigned to game ports correctly on Android, blue/pink washed out colours on Windows with 10-bit displays, and possible crash in Port dialogue box.

For Linux, it includes fixes for VP9 Profile 2 playback failure, and a leak of EGLFences in the DRM Prime renderer.
Continue Reading…

In News Kodi, XBMC media center

Chromium to Allow VA-API Hardware Decoding in Linux Wayland

Last updated: January 8, 2024 — Leave a comment

For Chromium user, the popular web browser is finally to allow VA-API hardware decoding for video playback in Linux Wayland.

Chromium so far does NOT officially support VA-API Video Acceleration API on Linux. However, there are experimental flags to enable this feature, which might work on certain configurations, but without guarantees (See the official Docs).

This experimental feature however does not work in Linux with Wayland session. Meaning the most recent Ubuntu, Fedora, & other Linux with GNOME Desktop.

Just few days ago on Saturday, Chromium source merged the request to “allowing VA-API on Linux Ozone/Wayland“, submitted by JianHui J Dai.

VaapiWrapper has been updated to remove the usage of libva-x11 and the legacy VaapiVideoDecodeAccelerator, in favor of libva-drm only. This means now Linux Ozone/Wayland can share the same code path as Linux Ozone/X11. See CL:4938496.

This CL removes the remaining libva-x11 codes from Ozone and VaapiWrapper, and allows VA-API by default on Linux Ozone/Wayland.

In News chromium browser, web

Linux 6.7 Released with Many New Hardware Support (Kernel PPA)

Last updated: January 8, 2024 — Leave a comment

Linux Kernel 6.7 is finally released! Linus Torvalds announced the release on Sunday night:

So we had a little bit more going on last week compared to the holiday week before that, but certainly not enough to make me think we’d want
to delay this any further.

End result: 6.7 is (in number of commits: over 17k non-merge commits, with 1k+ merges) one of the largest kernel releases we’ve ever had, but the extra rc8 week was purely due to timing with the holidays, not about any difficulties with the larger release.

The new Kernel release has many new and improved hardware support!

For Intel, the Turbostat command utility now supports Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake (15th gen) processors; LPSS (Low-Power Sub-System) driver now support Lunar Lake M processors; The Meteor Lake (14th gen mobile processors) graphics support now considered stable.

All the newest AMD Radeon RDNA2 and RDNA3 GPUs with Display Core Next 3.0 has Seamless Boot enabled.

And, NVIDIA has GSP support in the open-source Nouveau driver for initial GeForce RTX 40 acceleration support and improved RTX 20/30 series hardware support.

In News kernel, linux

Foliate eBook reader now Supports OPDS catalogs & JPEG-XL

Last updated: January 8, 2024 — 1 Comment

Folicate, the modern ebook reader, released version 3.1.0 with new features support.

It’s a free open-source reader written in JavaScript, and uses GTK4 plus LibAdwaita for its modern user interface, that works in most Linux Desktop and mobile devices such as PinePhone.

Folicate can open local ebook in EPUB, Mobipocket, Kindle, FB2, CBZ, and PDF file formats. It supports online digital libraries such as Feedbooks, Internet Archive, Manybook, Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, unglue.it.

In News ebook reader

Lossless Cut – Swiss Army Knife of Video Cutter added Full-Screen Support

Last updated: January 5, 2024 — Leave a comment

Lossless Cut, the popular free open-source video cutting/trimming tool, updated recently with full-screen support.

There are a few tools to cut out a fragment of a video in Linux, besides using heavy video editor application (e.g., Kdenlive and OpenShot). They include Video Trimmer, VidCutter.

However, Lossless Cut is my top favorite one! It lets you quickly extract the good parts from your videos and discard many gigabytes of data. It’s extremely fast because it does almost direct data copy instead of re-encoding with the power of FFmpeg library.

In News video cutter

Shutter works on Wayland for Select Area & Window Screenshots

Last updated: January 2, 2024 — Leave a comment

For Ubuntu 22.04/23.10, Fedora & other Linux with Wayland, Shutter screenshot tool can finally take screenshots for selected area and app windows!

Shutter is (or was) an excellent feature rich screenshot tool, with image editing and uploading support.

It was one of my top favorite apps, but removed from Ubuntu repositories due to lack of maintenance. Though, it’s later added back to system repository, thanks to open-source community’s work by porting it to GTK3.

In News screenshot tool, shutter