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.
This is a step by step beginners guide shows how to install Pale Moon web browser through its official Linux tarball in Ubuntu.
Pale Moon is a free open-source web browser that was started as a fork of Firefox, but now completely diverged from Firefox. It retains the highly customizable user interface, continues to support legacy add-ons and extensions, and runs in single-process mode.
The browser provides official package for Linux through a tarball, the binary package however is proprietary but NOT open-source.
This tutorial is going to show you how to install it through the tarball, though there’s an 3rd party apt repository contains the .deb package for choice.
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.
Network diagnostic is useful when you getting internet connection issue. And, here’s a brand new graphical tool for Linux beginners.
It’s PingPath, a free open-source tool written mostly in C, and use GTK4 toolkit for its user interface.
PingPath uses the popular command line tool ping to send ICMP ECHO_REQUEST to networks hosts. Simply type the host-name or IP address in header input box, hit Enter, then press Ctrl+S to get started.
It will then show you all the host IPs (if you start with host-name), as well as their autonomous system numbers and country code. For each, it shows the real time information about
Besides digital information, it also has a Graph tab to show all the info in graph lines with or without legend. This makes it easier to identify connectivity problems, measure network latency between your machine and the destination host.
The app by default sends 100 packets with 1 seconds time interval. You can change the numbers and other settings using the header-bar button menus.
The tool has an official PPA which so far supports for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 23.10, and Ubuntu 24.04.
1. First, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run command to add the PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lrou2014/pingpath
Type user password for sudo authentication, and hit Enter to continue.
2. If you’re following this tutorial on Linux Mint, then you may either use Software Manager or manually refresh package cache by running command:
sudo apt update
3. Finally, install the network diagnostic tool by command:
sudo apt install pingpath
Once installed, search for and launch it from either start menu or Gnome overview screen depends on your desktop environment, and enjoy!
To uninstall the tool, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command:
sudo apt remove --autoremove pingpath
And, remove the PPA, either by running the command below in terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:lrou2014/pingpath
Or, use the Software & Updates tool to remove the source line under Other Software tab.
For Ubuntu machine with NVIDIA graphics card, here’s how to implement hardware acceleration for video playback in Firefox web browser.
Firefox so far only supports VA-API for GPU decoding to offload CPU and save power. Both Intel and AMD GPUs support VA-API. However, NVIDIA so far supports the api only through the open-source Nouveau driver.
If you have only NVIDIA GPU running with proprietary driver, then hardware video acceleration does not work out-of-the-box for Firefox.
For choice, there are libvdpau-va-gl1 driver (h.264 only) or libva-vdpau-driver, but both seems no longer updated. The best choice so far is the free open-source nvidia vaapi driver.
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GNOME introduced new core camera app in the release of version 45, which however not adopted as default in Ubuntu 23.10 or Fedora 39.
If you want to try it out, then here’s how to do the trick in Ubuntu 24.04 and/or Ubuntu 23.10, and workaround “No Camera Found” issue.
The new camera app, aka Gnome Snapshot, is written in GTK4 + Libadwaita. Compare to Cheese, it looks more modern and native in current Ubuntu and Fedora Workstation.
Image from gnome.org
This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to install the latest version of Nginx web server (either mainline or stable) in Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop or Server.
Nginx is a popular free and open-source web server, that can be also used as reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache.
For a just working version, user can run command sudo apt install nginx-full to install it from Ubuntu system repository, which however is always old.
For the latest version, there are 2 ways to install the web server. Besides building from source, they include Ubuntu PPA and Nginx’s official repository.
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!
Got a CH341a series USB programmer? Here’s a graphical free I2C EEPROM programmer tool for Linux Desktop.
There are a number of programs for Windows, such as CH341Programmer, NEOProgrammer, and ASProgrammer, for working with popular “green” and “black” CH341a devices, but it lacks a graphical interface for Linux.
So, Linux IMSProg was born to provides a graphical interface to read, write, erase and test I2C, SPI and MicroWire EEPROM/Flash chips (24xxx, 25xxx, 93xxx, 95xxx series).
It’s a free open-source tool based on Qt5, that uses QHexEdit2 for hex editor widget and a modified set of the SNANDer programmer libraries.
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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