News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
This simple tutorial shows how to easily make your KUbuntu desktop layout to be Ubuntu (GNOME) Style, that includes top-panel, left side-bar, and a full-screen launcher.
KDE Plasma is highly customizable. User can manually add new panel, configure its position, add panel items. But, without struggling with configurations, there’s a theme can automate the process, to make your Plasma Desktop look like Ubuntu with default GNOME desktop.
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.
This simple tutorial shows how to install the last Enlightenment desktop 0.26.0 in Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 23.10 via PPA.
Enlightenment announced 0.26.0 release almost a month ago. There’s however no easy way to install it in Ubuntu, besides building from the source.
To make life easier, I’ve built the package into this unofficial PPA. So, you can easily try it out in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and/or Ubuntu 23.10.
Changes in Enlightenment 0.26.0 include:
Looking for an alternative to macOS Dropover utility? Collector is the one for Linux Desktop!
It’s a free and open-source tool to make drag & drop easier. Without having to open side-by-side windows, just paste or drag whatever content into the small app window, stash, gather, and then move all items to destination at once.
This is useful if you have many files to move, but they are saved in different locations. Just drag’n’drop them into Collector, then preview and/or edit them, finally drag’n’drop to destination folder at once.
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.
Play Final Fantasy XIV Online in Linux? There’s a custom launcher for the game for better experience!
It’s XIVLauncher, a free and open-source launcher that provides a customized WINE version for perfect compatibility with FFXIV.
Since the original launcher is slow and cannot save your password, XIVLauncher provides a faster experience, better Linux integration, as well as following QoL features:
Linux is getting more IPTV player applications in recent years. Here I’m going to introduce yuki-iptv, a new one with EPG support.
Personally, I prefer hypnotix which is developed by Linux Mint team, since it has a large list of built-in TV channels. But if you want more features, then yuki-iptv is a good choice to try out.
The IPTV player does NOT provide any content or TV channels. User has to manually add M3u / M3u8 / XSPF playlists (see github.com/iptv-org/iptv) and/or TV guide address via config dialog.
Yuki-iptv add playlist
Besides basic M3u / M3u8 / XSPF playlists support, the app also support viewing unencrypted streams UDP (multicast), HTTP, HLS (M3u8), XTream API, as well as TV program (EPG) support in XMLTV and JTV formats.
Got GameBoy, GameBoy Advance, or GameBoy Color ROMs? It’s easy to play them in your Linux PC through VBA-M emulator.
There are quite a few game emulators for Linux. You can use PPSSPP to run PSP games, and RetroArch for multiple consoles support. For Nintendo Game Boy and Game Boy Advance, VBA-M is a good choice.
VBA-M, stands for VisualBoyAdvance-M, is the continued development of the now inactive VisualBoy Advance project, with many improvements from various forks.
It’s a free open-source emulator app that included in system repositories for many Linux, including Fedora, Arch, Manjaro, and so forth.
Need a tool to edit your apps in the start menu, main menu, or Gnome overview search results? Try MenuLibre!
In most Linux, all app icons you see in start menu, dock launcher, and the desktop, are handled by .desktop config files. By editing the file, you can change the app icon, name, hide the app, add right-click menu option, and choose which file types to be associated with.
I’m written about how to configure .desktop file using a single command.
For graphical ways, there are quite a few apps to do the job, and here are 3 of them:
MenuLibre is an advanced tool written in Python and GTK3 toolkit. With it, user can get started by either searching or browsing in left to select app to edit, or click “+” in top left to create new menu entry for your app.
