Has a backlit keyboard in your PC? This extension makes possible to control the backlight brightness by adding a slider bar into upper right corner system tray menu in GNOME desktop.
Under system volume and screen brightness sliders, it adds a third slider bar allows to easily control the keyboard backlight.
The extension so far supports for GNOME 40 and GNOME 41. Which means, you need Ubuntu 21.10, Fedora 34 / 35, Arch Linux, or Manjaro Linux, etc. And, of course you must have a backlit keyboard that’s already properly working in your system.
The extension just provides easy way to control backlight brightness, so user does no longer need to open Gnome control center (aka ‘Settings’) every time or even edit any config file. It does NOT provide any Linux driver in case your backlit keyboard is not working properly.
Install Keyboard Backlight Slider Extension:
1. Ubuntu user needs to first press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal, and run command to install the ‘chrome-gnome-shell’ package:
NOTE: Ubuntu 21.10 has Firefox as Snap package, which does not support installing Gnome Extensions so far. Use another browser or install Firefox as native DEB.
Don’t see the toggle icon? Use the ‘Click here to install browser extension‘ link to install browser extension and refresh the page.
Once installed, you should see the slider bar in system tray menu as the top picture shows. To turn it off or remove the extension, search for and open ‘Gnome Extensions’ app from activities overview:
Manage Gnome Extensions
The app lists all available Gnome Extensions as well as options to toggle on/off and uninstall.
The Kdenlive video editor 21.12 was released this Monday with exciting new features!
As the last release in 2021, it introduced Slip trimming mode support. By selecting a clip in the timeline, use may use menu “Tool -> Slip tool” to drag moving the clip. This will change the start and end points of the clip simultaneously while keeping the original duration.
Another big new feature is Multicam Editing. It allows to edit the multiple cameras’ footage. By adding video clips in different tracks but at the same position, user may enable it via “Tool -> Multicam tool“. Then, either press corresponding numbers (e.g., 1 for track v1 and 2 for track v2) or click in monitor to trim the clips in the desired track.
Multiple project Bins and speaking of Bins support.
User manual via Sphinx.
Stable for macOS with Intel.
Update code base license to GPLv3.
How to Install Kdenlive 21.12 in Ubuntu / Linux Mint:
The Kdenlive official PPA has been updated with the latest packages for Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, Ubuntu 21.10, and their derivatives, e.g, Linux Mint 20, Elementary OS 6, and Zorin OS 16.
1.) Add Ubuntu PPA:
Open ‘terminal’ from your system application menu, then run command to add the PPA:
Type your password when it asks (no asterisk feedback) and hit Enter to continue.
2. ) Install or Upgrade Kdenlive:
If an old version of kdenlive was installed, you can upgrade it via Update Manager:
Or simply run command in terminal to install the video editor:
sudo apt install kdenlive
NOTE for Linux Mint or may be other Ubuntu based systems, you need to update the package cache manually by running sudo apt update command before installing the software.
Uninstall:
To purge the PPA as well as downgrade Kdenlive package, run command in terminal:
Liferea feed reader and news aggregator released version 1.13.7 a few days ago as the latest development release.
Liferea is a GTK+3 news reader with an embedded web browser. It supports for reading articles offline, force fetch full article text using HTML5 extraction, and subscribing to HTML5 websites that do not even have a feed.
It may also permanently save headlines in news bins, and supports for synchronizing with “TinyTinyRSS”, “TheOldReader”, and “Reedah”.
The 1.13.7 release continues working on the ‘Reader mode’. User now can toggle on/off Reader mode by right-clicking on lower right HTML view area via context menu option. And, it now allows to convert TinyTinyRSS subscriptions to local scriptions.
Support for user-agent string customization and anonymization.
Add ‘Always show in Reduced Feed List’ option in news bin properties.
Execute feed pipe/filter commands asynchronously.
Fix HTML view blanking when following links by left click
Fix UI blocking when using command pipes or feed filters
Fix truncated content after Youtube embeds
Fix wrong (doubled) number of unread items
And other fixes, translation and documentation updates.
How to Install Liferea in Ubuntu Linux:
The RSS feed reader is available to install via universal Flatpak package.
Some users stick to the native deb package, so I uploaded it into may personal PPA for Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, Ubuntu 21.10 and derivatives, e.g., Linux Mint 20. Due to outdated dependency library, Ubuntu 18.04 is not supported in this PPA.
1. Add the Ubuntu PPA:
First, either search for and open terminal from start menu, or simply press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When terminal opens, run command to add the PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps
Type user password (no asterisk feedback) when it asks and hit Enter to continue.
2. Install / Upgrade Liferea:
Since Ubuntu 20.04+ checks package updates automatically while adding PPA, you can now run command to install the feed reader:
sudo apt install liferea
or launch ‘Software Updater’ and upgrade the package from an old release. NOTE: some Ubuntu based systems may require to manually update cache via sudo apt update command first.
How to Remove Liferea and the Ubuntu PPA:
The PPA also contains some other software packages, so you may remove it after installing Liferea, by either running command:
Use LogMeIn Hamachi VPN service? Haguichi is a graphical app to make easy to join, create and manage Hamachi networks in Linux.
Haguichi is a free and open-source app that provides a stylish GTK UI for the official Hamachi for Linux. It has both dark and light window mode that shows a searchable and sortable network list in the left and details and actions in the right.
It’s well integrated with the Gnome desktop with notifications and system tray indicator applet, and make it easy to backup and restore configuration, as well as manage customize commands via Preferences dialog. And, it supports a list of keyboard shortcuts to make network and command actions more efficient.
Also, it’s being developed to fit well in other desktop environments (e.g., MATE, Cinnamon, KDE) including app theme, icon set, file manager and terminal support.
How to Install Haguichi in Ubuntu:
The app has official PPA so far contains the latest packages for Ubuntu 24.04, Linux Mint 22, and Ubuntu 24.10, as well as old v1.4.6 for Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, and 22.04.
Besides modern 64-bit desktop PC and laptop, the PPA also supports arm64/armhf CPU architectures (e.g., Apple Silicon and Raspberry Pi)
1. Add the PPA:
Firstly, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run command to add the PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ztefn/haguichi-stable
Type user password (no asterisk feedback) when it asks and hit Enter to continue.
2. Update system package cache:
Ubuntu now automatically refresh system package cache while adding PPA with the add-apt-repository command. But if you’re following this tutorial in Linux Mint, you may run the command below to update cache manually:
sudo apt update
3. Install Haguichi:
Finally, use command to install the app:
sudo apt install haguichi
By keeping the PPA, user may always has the app up-to-date either via Software Updater or by running sudo apt upgrade regularly.
4. Install Hamachi for Linux:
As a graphical front-end, the app needs the official command line client to work properly. Just download the “amd64.deb” for PC or “armel/armhf.deb” for ARM device from the link below:
Then install the deb via your favorite package manager (usually double-click .deb package will bring up default package installer).
How to Install Haguichi in other Linux:
The app is also packaged for other Linux systems. Arch Linux may get it from AUR. Fedora has the copr repository. And it’s available in official openSUSE repositories.
For Debian, Raspberry Pi OS and Kali Linux, there’s another official PPA repository present. Though it’s built against Ubuntu Bionic (18.04), and user may run commands below one by one to properly add PPA and install Haguichi.
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ztefn/haguichi-debian/ubuntu bionic main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/haguichi-debian.list'
Remember the old fashioned Desktop Cube effect? Almost 10 years ago, Ubuntu user may enable this Compiz effect, so press and hold Ctrl+Alt key and drag the mouse will turn Desktop into a rotatable cube.
Desktop Cube effect in Ubuntu 12.04
Now there’s an extension to reproduce this effect in GNOME 40 & 41. Which means, users of Ubuntu 21.10, Fedora Workstation 35, or Arch Linux so far may try out this cool 3D effect in their desktop.
If you don’t see the toggle icon, click the link says’Click here to install browser extension‘ to install browser extension and refresh the web page.
Once installed, either press Super/Windows key or click ‘Activities’ to trigger overview, then switch workspaces via Ctrl+Alt+Arrow to start the effect.
NOTE: To get better effect, it’s better to have more than 3 workspaces. Just open or move a window to the second workspace, it will create a new workspace automatically. Or, install and open Gnome Tweaks and set a static number of workspaces:
Uninstall Desktop Cube extension:
To remove the extension, just go to the extension web page via the button above and turn off the slider icon.
Or, search for and install ‘Gnome Extensions‘ app in Ubuntu Software (Gnome Software) and use the tool to manage extensions.
Mozilla Firefox web browser 95.0 was released today with security and performance improvements.
The release introduced new RLBox sandboxing technology that uses WebAssembly to isolate potentially-buggy code. And, it’s enabled by default on all platforms (desktop and mobile) to protect users from accidental defects as well as supply-chain attacks.
For Windows 10 and Windows 11, Firefox now is available in Microsoft Store for easy install. MacOS user now has less CPU usage during event processing, and less power usage when decoding video (e.g., streaming Netflix and Amazon Prime Video).
Firefox in Microsoft Store
Other changes in Firefox 95 include:
Picture-in-Picture (pop out video) now has option to toggle buttons to left/right.
Enable site isolation for all users to protect against side-channel attacks such as Spectre.
Faster content process startup on macOS.
Improved page load performance.
Various bug-fixes.
How to Get Firefox 95 in Ubuntu Linux:
For Ubuntu 21.10 with the pre-installed Firefox as Snap, user should now has the latest release since it updates automatically. Other Ubuntu releases may search for and install it from Ubuntu Software (snapcraft.io/firefox).
For those prefer the classic DEB package (defaults in Ubuntu 21.04 & earlier), just wait and Ubuntu will publish the package in next few days. At that time, either use ‘Software Updater‘ or run command below will upgrade the Firefox package:
sudo apt upgrade
Mozilla also provides Linux tarball in its website. User may just extract it and click run the executable file to launch the web browser. Along with the release note, get it from the link below:
This simple tutorial shows how to install the latest Tesseract OCR engine in all current Ubuntu releases (Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and Ubuntu 20.04) via PPA.
Tesseract is the most accurate open-source OCR engine that reads a wide variety of image formats and converts them to text in over 40 languages. Tesseract 5.0.0 was officially released a few days ago that features:
Faster training and OCR performance while less memory usage via ‘fast bloats’.
Support for latest macOS and Apple Silicon
Better ARM/ARM64 support.
API improvements and more.
How to Install Tesseract OCR in Ubuntu:
The optical character recognition engine is available in Ubuntu repositories though it’s always old.
Thanks to Alexander Pozdnyakov, the maintainer of Tesseract OCR in Debian/Ubuntu official repository, also maintains few PPAs with the latest packages. And, most CPU architectures (amd64, i386, arm64/armhf, ppc64el, s390x) are supported.
Option 1: Add Tesseract 4.x PPA
For the latest release of Tesseract OCR 4 (v4.1.3 so far), the stable PPA contains the packages for Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.10, and old Ubuntu 16.04/14.04.
Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run the command below to add the PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alex-p/tesseract-ocr
Type user password when it asks (no visual feedback) and hit Enter to continue.
Option 2: Add Tesseract 5 PPA
The new 5.x release series (5.4.1 so far) is available in the another PPA for Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and Ubuntu 20.04.
Also, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal and run command:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alex-p/tesseract-ocr5
NOTE: install the OCR from this PPA will override the old 4.x packages, though it’s not 100 % API compatible with v4.0.
Option 3: Add Tesseract repository for Debian:
For Debian Stretch, Buster, Bullseye, and Sid, there’s apt repositories for both Tesseract v4 and v5. User may follow the link button below to add the repository:
After adding a PPA or repository from the previous options, run command in terminal to refresh system package cache in case you’re still running old Ubuntu 18.04 and earlier:
sudo apt update
And, finally install the software engine via command:
sudo apt install tesseract-ocr
Or, upgrade the package using Software Updater:
How to Remove PPAs & uninstall Tesseract OCR:
To remove the PPAs, either run previous add-apt-repository command with --remove flag, or use Software & Updates utility under ‘Other Software’ tab.
For those don’t like the Snap package, this is a step by step guide shows how to install latest Blender via its official Linux tarball in Ubuntu.
The latest Blender is quite easy to install in Ubuntu since it’s available in Ubuntu Software. However, it’s Snap package!
For choice, the Blender foundation provides the portable Linux tarball, but it lacks app shortcut for launching from system start menu. So, I’m writing this how to tutorial to deal with it.
NOTE: This tutorial should work on most Linux (e.g., Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint) that support .desktop file, though the title said for Ubuntu.
Install Blender via Linux Tarball:
1. Download Linux Tarball
First, go to the official download page. Click download Blender for Linux. It’s a 64-bit tarball ‘blender-x.x.x-linux-x64.tar.xz‘ for modern PC/laptop:
After downloading the package, extract, and finally click run the executable file will launch the 3D creation software.
If you want to make it show in system start menu (Activities overview search results), you need to do following more steps.
2. Extract Tarball to /opt for global use:
Here I’m going to extract the tarball to /opt directory and create app shortcut for Blender.
1.) Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run command to backup old blender folder under ‘/opt’ if any:
sudo mv /opt/blender /opt/blender.back
Ignore ‘No such file or directory’ output. It means you don’t have old file to backup.
2.) Create new blender folder under /opt:
sudo mkdir -p /opt/blender
3.) Extract Blender tarball from Downloads folder to the new created folder:
sudo tar -Jxf ~/Downloads/blender-*-linux-x64.tar.xz --strip-components=1 -C /opt/blender
NOTE: Instead of running the commands above in terminal, user may decompress the tarball in file manager and move source folder to desired location. However, moving to /opt needs root permission. So, open file manager via sudo nautilus ~/Downloads command is required
3. Verify if the Blender executable works:
After extracting the Linux tarball into /opt/blender. User may run command to list that directory to verify:
ls /opt/blender
And, run this command should launch the software:
/opt/blender/blender
Sometimes, app may refuse to launch due to missing shared library. If so, copy the library name and search in packages.ubuntu.com under ‘Search the contents of packages’ to find out the required package and install it.
4. Create app shortcut for Blender:
The Linux tarball includes the shortcut file by default, though it won’t work since PATH to executable varies depend where you put the folder. Run command in terminal to open the file via gedit text editor:
sudo gedit /opt/blender/blender.desktop
For Ubuntu 22.10+, replace gedit with gnome-text editor in command. For non-GNOME desktop, use mousepad for XFCE, xed for cinnamon, or nano command line editor works for most cases.
When it opens, change the ‘Exec’ and ‘Icon’ lines into:
Here I copied the app shortcut file to local folder for single user use. And, the app icon shows in ‘Activities’ overview search result immediately. Though, it’s better to change the ownership to yourself.
My Ubuntu laptop recently runs into a power-off issue. Every time when I shutdown or reboot the machine, it stuck at blank screen with text message “systemd-shutdown[1]: waiting for process: crond” for more than a minute.
According to the keyword ‘crond‘, it has something to do with the cron schedule job. And, thanks to this thread, user may run the command below to list all current schedule cron jobs:
find /etc/cron* -type f | xargs ls -ltr
And there you’ll find that the schedule job ‘/etc/cron.d/collect‘ tries to run an unknown crond binary under ‘/var/tmp’ every 10th minute (e.g., 5:10, 5:20, 5:30 …). So the problem may not occur when shutdown/reboot within a few minutes after login.
The /var/tmp directory stores temporary files or folders that are preserved between system reboots. According to @bird7676 in that thread, the files were probably created by Free Download Manager.
Solution:
If you don’t use and have removed the Free Download Manager, simply remove these temporary files as well as the schedule job.
To do so, either use a system cleaner (e.g., BleachBit), or press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal and run command below to remove the files:
Vivaldi web browser released version 5.0 today with exciting new features.
The release makes it easy to change the app UI appearance via themes. Vivaldi comes with some themes with different colors, background image, blur, transparency and other settings. User may edit or create new theme easily with the built-in editor.
Vivaldi built-in themes & editor
And in ‘Themes’ setting page, it provides option to export theme into zip archive. So your friends may easily get the same Vivaldi appearance by opening the Zip archive in settings.
The browser now has built-in translation support powered by Lingvanex. By clicking on the icon from left panel, user may translate any text selection to the native language automatically by enabling ‘Auto-translate selected text’ option.
And according to the release note, only Vivaldi servers are involved, meaning you don’t have to share what you read with Big Tech’s ‘prying eyes’.
Other change in Vivaldi 5.0 include:
Additional way of showing downloads.
Provide rpm packages for ARM / ARM64.
Two-Level Tab Stacks on mobile and tablets.
Handle page actions as commands
Add parameter to search with selection command: to specify search engine
Add option to not show Calendar notifications.
Add Oauth support for Office365/Outlook in built-in Mail.
How to get Vivaldi:
The official download page offers Linux DEB for both 64-bit PC and arm64 machines (e.g., Raspberry Pi).
Vivaldi also has an official apt repository, with it you can install the browser and get future updates through Software Updater utility.
Open terminal either via Ctrl+Alt+T keyboard shortcut or by searching for terminal from application menu. When it opens, run following commands one by one:
