News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
This simple tutorial shows how to disable (or auto-delete) “recent” files tab in left side-bar of file manager in Ubuntu 24.04 & 22.04.
GNOME Files, aka Nautilus file manager, has a “Recent” tab in left side-bar, which include all the recent opened photos, videos, and documents.
It’s useful for user or applications to quickly re-open recent edited files. However, when working at a public place, it can be better to disable this feature since it may contain sensitive data.
This is a step by step beginners guide shows how to install Ruby and setup local programming environment in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
Ruby is an interpreted, high-level programming language designed with an emphasis on programming productivity and simplicity. It was first released 29 years ago in 1995, by Yukihiro Matsumoto in Japan.
Ruby is available to install in Ubuntu in a few different ways, they include:
And, here’s how to install them in Ubuntu step by step.
Continue Reading…
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.
Don’t remember how many tools, I’ve written about, for monitoring CPU, RAM, Network, and other system resources usage in Ubuntu. But, there’s a brand-new for GNOME, the default desktop environment.
It’s Astra Monitor, a free open-source tool provides highly customizable interface on Gnome top-panel, to monitor CPU, GPU, RAM memory, disk storage, network usage, as well as hardware temperature, voltage, and fan speed.
It supports displaying the data in real-time bar, history graph, percentage number, with user selected order, in left, center, or right corner of panel.
Aster Monitor on GNOME Panel
Besides having quick glance at system resource usage, user can also click on the indicator icon to pop-up a rich drop-down menu with detailed information. By moving cursor over the menu can also display even more about the hardware, resource load, processes, and so forth.
Continue Reading…
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.
Continue Reading…
This tutorial shows how to turn off CPU turbo boost, and/or set constant maximum (or minimum) CPU speed in Ubuntu 22.04 and/or Ubuntu 24.04.
Disable turbo boost will limit your CPU speed to prevent running over the base frequency. It’s useful to save power and prevent your computer from overheating. For choice, user can also set constant CPU speed for either minimum power consumption or maximum performance.
Most machine today has option in the BIOS page to enable/disable and even change CPU frequency, however, it’s not flexible.
For Linux, the Kernel has a tool called cpupower can do the job from command line, and user can turn on/off turbo boost through sysfs. Gnome Desktop even has a GRAPHICAL extension (scroll-down to see step 4) to make things easier.
This simple tutorial shows how to install Nicotine plus, the graphical client for the Soulseek peer-to-peer network, in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and Ubuntu 24.04.
Soulseek is an ad-free, spyware free, and plain free file sharing network, make it easy for you to find people with similar interests, and make new discoveries!
And, Nicotine is a lightweight, pleasant, free and open source (FOSS) alternative to the official Soulseek client, while also providing a comprehensive set of features.
The app used to be available in Ubuntu system repository, but removed due to lack of development. It’s later revived and finally added back to Ubuntu 24.04 repository.
For current Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and even Ubuntu 18.04, user can install it from the official PPA.
Nicotine in Ubuntu 22.04
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.
Continue Reading…
This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to install VS-Codium IDE in Ubuntu, using 4 different ways.
VSCodium is a free and open-source software binaries of VS Code. It’s NOT a fork, but a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VS Code.
The VSCodium project was born due to:
Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking.
It’s a good choice as a telemetry-less version of VS Code without rebuilding by programmers themselves.
Codium in Ubuntu
This simple tutorial shows how to install the latest version of libheif library, for better HEIF and AVIF image formats support, in Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04 and/or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Libheif is a popular free open-source library for encoding and decoding HEIF and AVIF. Which, also has partial support for JPEG-in-HEIF, JPEG2000, uncompressed (ISO/IEC 23001-17:2023) capabilities.
It supports libde265 and/or ffmpeg for decoding HEIC images, and x265/kvazaar for encoding. For AVIF images, it uses either AOM/dav1d for decoding, and AOM/rav1e/svt-av1 for encoding support.
As well, it has command line tools to convert HEIF/HEIC to other images, and convert images to HEIF/HEIC.
Many popular applications, including GIMP, Darktable, ImageMagick, Krita, and gThumb, use libheif for HEIF and/or AVIF support. And, the library is usually installed as dependency along with them.
gThumb use libheif for AVIF support
