Arduino IDE 2.3 Released, Debug Feature Goes Stable

Last updated: February 8, 2024 — 1 Comment

The Arduino team announced the 2.3 release of the Arduino IDE this Wednesday.

Since v2.3, the debug feature is now stable and fully incorporated into the IDE! It’s now based on a standard framework, and enabled for all the Arduino boards based on the Mbed™ core, include GIGA R1 WiFi, Portenta H7, Opta, Nano BLE and Nano RP2040 Connect.

Maintainers of Arduino cores can now add debugging for any board. And, the upcoming release of the Arduino-ESP32 core will support the new debug framework!

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How to Install GO (golang 1.23) in Ubuntu 24.04 | 22.04

Last updated: September 23, 2024 — 3 Comments

Go programming language announced the new 1.23 release on 13 August, 2024! Here’s the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu & other Linux.

What’s New in Go 1.23:

  • The “range” clause in a “for-range” loop now accepts iterator functions of the following types: func(func() bool), func(func(K) bool), func(func(K, V) bool).
  • preview support for generic type aliases
  • Add All, Values, Backward, Collect, AppendSeq, Sorted, SortedFunc, SortedStableFunc, Chunk functions in slices package.
  • Add All, Keys, Values, Insert, Collect functions in maps package.
  • Add new structs package provides types for struct fields that modify properties of the containing struct type such as memory layout.
  • Go toolchain is possible to collect usage and breakage statistics
  • New go env -changed, go mod tidy -diff flags
  • Setting the GOROOT_FINAL environment variable no longer has an effect.
  • The go list -m -json command now includes new Sum and GoModSum fields
  • The go vet subcommand now reports symbols that are too new for the intended Go version.
  • New iter, structs, unique packages.
  • supports the new godebug directive in go.mod and go.work files
  • time.Timer and time.Ticker no longer referred to by the program become eligible for garbage collection immediately
  • the timer channel associated with a Timer or Ticker is now unbuffered, with capacity 0.

See the announcement for more changes in Go 1.23.

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Enable Fingerprint Reader in Ubuntu 24.04/22.04 for ThinkPad T480s

Last updated: November 11, 2024 — 17 Comments

This is a step by step guide shows how to enable fingerprint reader support for Lenovo ThinkPad T480/T480s, X1 Carbon 6th gen, X1 Yoga 3rd gen, X280, etc with 06cb:009a device in Ubuntu 22.04.

Ubuntu has fingerprint reader support out-of-the-box using libfprint, and provides option to enable fingerprint login in Users settings page. However, the library has a list of unsupported devices, including 06cb:009a that’s built-in in my used ThinkPad T480s laptop.

Thankfully, there’s a free open-source alternative python-validity that works in my case. Here’s how to install and set it up in Ubuntu 22.04, while Ubuntu 20.04 is also supported.

NOTE: This tutorial may also work in many other fingerprint readers, however, the project so far does NOT provide a page to list all supported devices.

Step 1: Tell Which Fingerprint Reader device do your laptop have

First of all, you may press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open up a terminal window.

Then run command to find out the device name of your fingerprint reader:

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How to Set Battery Charge Limit in Ubuntu 22.04 & 24.04

Last updated: February 6, 2024 — 8 Comments

This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to configure your Ubuntu laptop to limit the maximum battery charge level.

For those who keep laptop plugged in for long term, it’s better to set battery charge limit to reduce the battery wear by constantly trickle charging.

Linux Kernel supports battery charge threshold, and there’s a merge request to provide graphical UI options in Gnome Control Center. Until GNOME officially support this feature, you can follow this tutorial to do the job step by step.

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New PPA to Install .NET 8 in old Ubuntu 18.04 & Ubuntu 16.04

Last updated: February 5, 2024 — 2 Comments

For .NET developers, the latest .NET 8 can be installed on old Ubuntu 18.04 and/or Ubuntu 16.04 LTS easily through PPA.

.NET 8 was released few months ago in November, 2023. It’s a new LTS release with 3 years support, and features new code generator “Dynamic Profile-Guided Optimization” (PGO), AVX-512 instruction set, out-of-the-box AI features, first preview of .NET Aspire, native AoT, and various other changes. See the release note for details.

.NET 8 is made into Ubuntu system repositories for Ubuntu 23.10 and upcoming Ubuntu 24.04. For Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, I’ve written how to install .NET 8 from Microsoft repository.

For users of Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 who can’t upgrade the system, there’s now a third-party PPA contains the .NET 8 packages for 64-bit Intel/AMD machines.

The PPA is maintained by Rob Savoury, who maintains so many PPAs with Blender, Chromium, FFmpeg, Firefox, LibreOffice, Qt5/6, Python, LLVM, Node.js, and other popular software packages with old Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 support!


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How to Install and Use Incus Container in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

Last updated: February 4, 2024 — Leave a comment

This simple tutorial shows how to install and use Incus container in Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Incus is a free open-source system container and virtual machine manager developed by Linux Containers community. It supports images for a large number of Linux distributions.

With it, you can manage your containers and VMs either with a simple command line tool, directly through the REST API or by using third-party tools and integrations.

Incus was started as community fork of Canonical’s LXD. Now, it’s led and maintained by much of the same people that once created LXD.

Step 1: Install Incus

Incus is available in Zabbly repository maintained by the software developer. So far, it supports Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 12 and Debian 11.

To install it, first open terminal from system start menu or Gnome activities overview screen. Ubuntu users can simply press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard.

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Deepin 23 Released Beta 3 with AI Plugin, More i386 Devices Support

Last updated: February 3, 2024 — Leave a comment

Deepin, the popular Linux Distribution from China, announced the last Beta of version 23 this Friday!

Deepin is a Linux Distro so far based on Debian ‘Stable’ branch, features Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE) that is built on Qt toolkit. It’s a free open-source system that has a very attractive desktop appearance.

Start in version 23, which is still in development, Deepin is going to be independent Linux Distribution. In the beta, it’s no longer depends on Debian or any other Linux, but still uses .deb and apt for installing and managing software packages.

The installer for Deepin 23 Beta3 is improved to be adaptive for different screen resolutions, including 768P, 1080P, 2K, and 4K. It added drivers support for certain i386 devices support, though without 32-bit download at the moment, due to human and resource limit.

The release introduced UOS AI plugin, available in system tray. User can communicate with it using text or voice. And, it can answer user questions and generate images based on user description.

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How to Install Python 3.13 Stable in Ubuntu 24.04 / 22.04

Last updated: October 9, 2024 — 1 Comment

This simple tutorial shows how to install Python 3.13 in Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and/or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Python 3.13.0 was released on Oct 7, 2024 as the new major release that features new interactive interpreter, that supports multi-line editing, REPL-specific commands such as help, exit, clear, and quit, interactive help, history browsing, and ‘paste mode’ for pasting larger blocks of code.

CPython now has experimental support for free-threaded mode for running threads in parallel on available CPU cores, though disabled by default.

Other changes in Python 3.13.0 include:

  • New interactive interpreter, features multi-line editing and color support, as well as colorized exception tracebacks.
  • Experimental free-threaded build mode.
  • A preliminary, experimental JIT.
  • The (cyclic) garbage collector is now incremental.
  • Include a modified version of mimalloc, and enabled by default if supported by the platform.
  • Docstrings now have their leading indentation stripped, reducing memory use and the size of .pyc files.
  • The dbm module has a new dbm.sqlite3 backend that is used by default when creating new files.
  • Support for type defaults in type parameters.
  • New type narrowing annotation, typing.TypeIs.
  • New annotation for read-only items in TypeDicts.
  • Removals of many deprecated modules: aifc, audioop, chunk, cgi, cgitb, crypt, imghdr, mailcap, msilib, nis, nntplib, ossaudiodev, pipes, sndhdr, spwd, sunau, telnetlib, uu, xdrlib, lib2to3.

For more, see the official release note.

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OnlyOffice Desktop Editors 8.0 Released with RTL, PDF Password Protection

Last updated: February 3, 2024 — Leave a comment

OnlyOffice, the popular free open-source office suite, announced new 8.0 release this Friday.

The release introduced one of the most awaited features, RTL support. It now supports bidirectional text in documents and presentations. But, RTL input is partially available with some limitations, since it’s still in Beta. In the settings page, user can enabled RTL interface with a checkbox, then restart the app to apply.

The new 8.0 release also added local interface themes support. Besides the built-in light, classic light, dark, and contrast dark, there’s now a “Add local theme” option to apply a custom interface using local JSON file.

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How to Install Floorp Web Browser in Ubuntu (Step by Step)

Last updated: February 2, 2024 — 1 Comment

This is a step by step beginners guide shows how to install the Floorp web browser in Ubuntu Desktop.

Floorp is a new free open-source web browser forked from Firefox. It’s promoted as “the most Advanced and Fastest Firefox derivative”.

The browser is based on Firefox ESR. It’s updated every 4 weeks, with security updates provided before each Firefox release. It has strong tracking protection, no user tracking, flexible layout, and switchable design.

Floorp provides official Linux packages through an apt repository and Flatpak package. Advanced users can simply follow the commands in its download page. For beginners here’s a step by step screenshots as well as descriptions.

Floorp Web Browser

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