News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
Visual Studio Code announce new monthly 1.97 release! Here are new features in the IDE release.
VS Code 1.97 is the first release in 2025. It added two more models OpenAI’s o3-mini and Gemini 2.0 Flash to choose from when using Copilot.
It introduced new Copilot Next Edit Suggestions (Copilot NES) preview feature to help with edits. Which, can both predicts the location of the next edit you’ll want to make and what that edit should be.
Looking for a digital pet application for your computer? Here’s one that works natively in Linux Desktop.
It’s Shijima, a cross-platform shimeji simulation, desktop pets app works on any device, including Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS, and Nintendo Wii.
The app is free to use but sadly NOT open-sourced so far. The PC/laptop edition uses Qt6 for its user interface. And so far, it’s at the first alpha stage that works for Linux only on KDE and GNOME (both X11 and Wayland) desktops.
Shijima-Qt provides portable executable file and AppImage for Linux. No installation is required. Just run to launch the app window, then, import shimeji mascots by drag’n’dropping the zip/rar/7z archive into app window. Finally, click to add your pets onto desktop and play with them!
The Shijima-Qt packages for Linux, Windows, and macOS are available to download in Github releases page via link below:
For Linux, select download the release-linux-x86_64.zip that works on modern Intel/AMD CPUs.
Then, decompress and finally run the “Shijima-Qt-x86_64.AppImage” from extracted folder to launch the app. To run it, either right-click and select “Run” (after enabled “Executable as Program” in its Properties dialog), or right-click on blank area in the folder that contains the executable files, select “Open in Terminal” and finally run command below in pop-up terminal window.
./Shijima-Qt-x86_64.AppImage
NOTE 1: Ubuntu since 22.04 does NOT support AppImage out-of-the-box, run sudo apt install libfuse2 in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) first to enable.
NOTE 2: Don’t know why, but first time launching the app will ask to log out and back in to apply something to make it work.
NOTE 3: Since v0.0.2 it has a default mascot. For more, you may to search (e.g., <character name> shimeji) and download from the web. And, here are some Murder Drones shimeji by @PolarSummit on X.
If you don’t like the AppImage, you may run the shijima-qt file in that folder instead to launch the app. It however requires Qt6 >= 6.7 that’s NOT available in Ubuntu repositories until 25.04.
Even in Ubuntu 25.04 (still in development stage), you need to run command to install the required run-time libraries:
sudo apt install libqt6widgets6 libqt6multimedia6 libqt6core6t64
And, finally run command from that folder to launch the executable file:
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb ./shijima-qt
OnlyOffice announced the new 8.3 release for its offline Desktop Editor apps yesterday.
The new release now is able to open and view files created in Apple iWork’s Pages, Keynote and Numbers, as well as Hancom Office’s .hwp and .hwpx file formats. However, for editing support they need to be converted to OOXML first, i.e. DOCX for text documents, XLSX for spreadsheets and PPTX for presentations.
As you may know, GNOME is moving to GTK4 + LibAdwaita in recent years. Core apps are either ported to the new frameworks or replaced with new ones.
GNOMOE Text Editor, GNOME Camera, GNOME Console, and Loupe replaced Gedit, Cheese, GNOME Terminal, and Eyes of GNOME as default text editor, camera app, terminal, and image viewer. And, it introduced Decibels as new core app for playing audio files.
Papers entered GNOME Incubator about a year ago, expects to replace Evince as default PDF and Document viewer. Now it’s made into Debian (Unstable) and Ubuntu (25.04) repository for choice, and it’s expected to be default perhaps later this year according to this thread.
GNOME Papers
Mozilla Firefox announced new 135.0 release on Tuesday. See what’s new in this monthly release.
The new release enhanced some features to make them work for all users. AI Chatbot, the experimental feature that’s introduced since Firefox 130, now is available to all users.
Just go to Settings -> Firefox Labs, then select AI between Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, Le Chat Mistral, then you may chat with AI in sidebar after login.
Firefox AI Chatbot made available to all users
Besides AI, the new browser release also extended the credit card autofill feature to all users globally, made the refreshed New Tab layout to users in all countries where Stories are available.
And, the built-in translations now support translating Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. While Russian is now available as a target language to translated into.
New Tab layout now works in all countries support Stories
Firefox 135 includes safeguards to prevent sites from abusing the history API by generating excessive history entries. Which however make navigating back and forward buttons difficult by cluttering the history.
Other changes in the new browser release include:
The release also includes some web development changes. It introduced a new console command $$$ allows to search the page including within shadow roots. It added support for the WebAuthn getClientCapabilities() method, and a post-quantum key exchange mechanism (mlkem768x25519) for HTTP/3.
The release note and official packages are available at the link below:
For Ubuntu 22.04+ users with default Firefox Snap package, it will automatically update to the latest, though user may manually check updates via command:
sudo snap refresh firefox
For native DEB package, user can choose either the official apt repository or MozillaTeam PPA, and here’s a step by step tutorial talking about it.
This is a beginner’s guide shows how to enable the experimental HDR feature in Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation, and other Linux with recent GNOME.
HDR is a technology allowing to transmit high dynamic range videos and images to compatible displays. KDE has HDR support in Plasma 6, and GNOME is going to add HDR toggle option in next v48 release.
GNOME to add HDR toggle option in next v48
NVIDIA released first Beta of the 570 driver series for Linux users a few days ago. See what’s new in this new driver.
NVIDIA Linux driver introduced VRR support for Wayland since 560 driver series. It’s a feature that adjust the monitor’s refresh rate on the fly, to match the frame rate of output signal from the graphics card.
The feature is useful for games to eliminate screen tearing and also lowers power consumption. And the new 570.86.16 driver enhanced it by supporting variable refresh rate (VRR) on systems with multiple monitors.
NVIDIA Settings 570
though the announcement is not ready yet at the moment. 
This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to configure Nginx to block certain IPs or IP range from accessing your website, and block all others while only you (and specified IPs) can access the wordpress login pages.
This site was under attack a few days ago. Someone made tens of thousands of constant requests that slowed down the server response. And, here’s what I did to manually block attacker’s IPs and restrict access to the login page.
Continue Reading…
Remember Plank, the simplest dock on the planet? There’s now a free open-source fork to make it fully functional in recent Linux Distributions.
Plank is a 14 years old application that provides an iOS bottom bar style dock app launcher, that’s great for lightweight Linux Desktops. The goal is to provide just what a dock needs and absolutely nothing more.
Plank seems not in active development, though it still works in recent Linux Distributions. However, it has compatibility issues and broken docklets/applets. For those who’re still using or prefer this dock, there’s now an open-source fork worth a try.
Plank in Linux Mint 22
It’s Plank-Reloaded, a fork of the original Plank project that focuses on Cinnamon desktop compatibility and modernized features.
With the new dock, the Clock docklet will no longer crash. And, it features updated digital clock layout as well as a calendar when clicking on the icon.
The Battery docklet has been updated with modern UPower integration. And, the “Matte” theme has been updated to look better, along with a light variant that based on the Arian theme.
New Plank Matte and Matte-light Themes
Other changes include general code cleanup and bug fixes. If you like it, you may report issues and request features by visiting the project page.
NOTE: Plank so far does NOT work on Wayland.
According to this feature request, the software developer is going to add pre-built .deb packages for Debian/Ubuntu, and Flatpak package for all Linux users.
At the moment, Arch & its based systems can install from the AUR repository.
While Ubuntu & Linux Mint users (tested on Linux Mint 22.1 & Ubuntu 24.04) can run the commands below one by one in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) to build from the source (this is the official guide with minor modification).
sudo apt remove plank libplank-common libplank1
sudo apt install git autogen autoconf autopoint libtool make valac libgnome-menu-3-0 libgnome-menu-3-dev libxml2-utils libgee-0.8-dev libbamf3-dev libwnck-3-0 libwnck-3-dev bamfdaemon
git clone https://github.com/zquestz/plank-reloaded.git
cd plank-reloaded
./bootstrap
make -j2
sudo make install
Here, -j2 option in second make command means to start 2 thread in parallel. You may change the number according how many CPU cores you have.
After successfully built the Plank-Reloaded, you may either run plank command in terminal to start the dock, or add it as startup program to auto-start at login.
Until you removed the source folder, you may navigate into that folder in terminal and run command below to uninstall:
sudo make uninstall
