News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
LibreOffice, the popular free open-source office suite, announced a new major release this Wednesday.
It’s LibreOffice 24.2.0, the first release introduced the new calendar-based numbering scheme (YY.M). Meaning it’s release in February, 2024.
The release added better support for Qt-based UI variants. It automatically switches to dark app color and dark icon theme for KDE Plasma when the desktop is set to dark style.
Budgie desktop announced the new 10.9 release this Monday! See what’s new in the free open-source desktop environment.
Budgie is a popular desktop environment that default in Ubuntu budgie, and optional in Debian, Fedora, Arch, Manjaro Linux, etc.
The most recent version 10.9 was released few days ago. It features initial port to Wayland, which is already default in Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation, and other Linux (such as Debian 12) with recent GNOME desktop.
It adopts XFCE’s libxfce4windowing library to make the transition from X11 to Wayland. And, in the release the Show Desktop applet, Alt+Tab window switcher, and Workspace applet have been ported to the new library.
Budgie 10.9 also takes into use the budgie-session. It’s a softish fork from GNOME session 44.x.
As you may know, GNOME is going to drop X11 session. The developer, Jordan Petridis, has submit the request in project page. To retain the X11 session until switch Budgie to being Wayland-only, the budgie-session is being in use to take place.
Another change in the release is the redesigned bluetooth applet. Instead of using an older version of gnome-bluetooth, the applet now directly communicates to BlueZ and UPower over D-Bus.
And, the applet now provides direct connect/disconnect functionality for paired devices, battery life indicators, as well as functionality for sending files to Bluetooth devices.
Image from https://buddiesofbudgie.org/
For more changes about the new desktop release, see the official release note.
To get the new desktop release, it’s better to wait your Distribution to package the updates. And, Arch Linux has already done the job.
For Ubuntu users, just keep an eye on the Ubuntu Budgie Team PPA.
Ubuntu 23.04, code-name ‘Lunar Lobster’, will be soon no longer supported!
Ubuntu 23.04 was released on April 20, 2023 with 9-month support circle. And, today January 25, 2024 is the last day it’s officially supported according to the announcement.
Meaning that Ubuntu developer team will no longer publish any security and package updates for users of Ubuntu 23.04. Also, third-party repositories and Ubuntu PPAs will mostly stop updating packages for 23.04.
There are security risks of using end-of-life system, so it’s better to either upgrade to Ubuntu 23.10, which is supported until July 2024, then upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 (with 5 years support) a few months later.
Or, re-install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS that is supported until 2027, plus 5 years of expanded security maintenance.
To download the latest Ubuntu images, go to ubuntu.com/download.
To upgrade Ubuntu 23.04 to Ubuntu 23.10, either see the official guide or this step by step guide. It’s IMPORTANT to make backup, since upgrade might fail due to various reasons!
Mozilla announced new 122.0 release for its free open-source Firefox web browser this Tuesday!
This is a new monthly release that include minor new features. For Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and their based systems, Firefox now provides official .deb packages through an apt repository.
Meaning now, there are 5 official ways to install Firefox in Ubuntu Linux:
Besides providing .deb package for the Stable release, the apt repository also includes the packages for Beta, Nightly, and Dev versions of the popular web browser.
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Guvcview, the free open-source tool for capturing image/video and dynamically controlling UVC camera and webcam devices, released version 2.1.0.
It’s a GTK3 and Qt5 application that provides both graphical interface and command line options to control your webcam or camera.
With it, you can change the brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, white balance (gamma), sharpness, backlight compensation, etc settings for your webcam.
Besides the dynamic control of UVC (USB Video Class) camera/webcam, it also allows to capture video with control of frame rate, filters such as mirror, invert, pieces, blur, etc. Also, capture audio with sample rate, latency, and filters including echo, reverb, fuzz, wahwah, and ducky.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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