UbuntuHandbook | News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux

Kodi 21 “Omega” Gets Its First RC Release

Last updated: March 8, 2024 — Leave a comment

After 3 alpha and 3 beta releases, Kodi media center 21, finally announced its first RC release this Thursday.

Kodi 21 is the next major release that’s still in development. The release features upstream FFmpeg 6.0, adds support for NFSv4, support M3U8 playlist files, AVIF images, HDR10 for Android.

The developer team asks users to try out the new development release and report issues to help to make it better. And, in the current RC1 release, changes include:

Allow users to set a subtitle save path
Fix that audiobooks showing their last chapter with no duration.
For Linux, allow Pipewire to properly identify HDMI for passthrough usage.
Implement Hotkeycontroller for media keys on macOS
Some color accuracy changes for 10bit SDR/HDR color mapping on Windows.
Allows subtitles to be tonemapped to avoid extreme brightness for HDR playback on Android.
Fix for icons not being correctly refreshed
See github releases page for more.

In News Kodi, XBMC media center

GNOME 46 to Add “Variable Refresh Rate” Configure Option

Last updated: March 6, 2024 — Leave a comment

GNOME 46, the default desktop for Ubuntu 24.04 and Fedora 40, will finally have the option to enable Variable Refresh Rate.

Variable Refresh Rate, VRR in short, is a feature for TV, monitor, and other displays, allowing to adjust refresh rate on the fly to match the frame rate of the graphics card. Which, is useful for smoother viewing experience, and reducing screen tearing.

GNOME has the feature request for VRR support 3 years ago. It’s finally merged and planned for GNOME 46, which will be released later this month!

According to this request, it’s an experimental feature. User needs to enable it first either via Dconf Editor or gsettings tool via the command:

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['variable-refresh-rate']"

Then, log out and back in. Gnome Control Center, aka Settings, will have the option in “Displays” panel, when you click expand the “Refresh Rate”.

image from gitlab.gnome.org

Once enabled the feature, and selected your preferred value, the Refresh Rate will be displayed as “Variable (up to xxx.xx Hz)”.

In News Gnome

How to Disable CPU Cores to Save Power in Ubuntu 24.04 | 22.04

Last updated: May 5, 2024 — Leave a comment

This tutorial shows how to disable certain CPU cores in Ubuntu to save power and prevent your machine from overheating.

There are a few tools to manage CPU frequency and save power in Linux today. They include power-profile-daemon (Gnome built-in power mode settings), TLP laptop battery life saving tool, auto-cpufreq, and more.

Besides limiting CPU frequency, turn off few CPU cores is another choice to cool down your PC or laptop. And, Motherboard BIOS settings page usually have a corresponding option. For choice, here’s how to do the job in Ubuntu Linux.

In Howtos power saving

Varia – Modern New Download Manager for GNOME Desktop

Last updated: March 5, 2024 — 1 Comment

Looking for a download manager for Ubuntu, Fedora, or other Linux with GNOME Desktop? Try Varia!

There are quite a few downloading apps for Linux Desktop. And, uGet is one of them that I prefer, which is however not updated for a few years.

For GNOME, the default desktop in Ubuntu and Fedora Workstation, there’s now a new download manager called Varia. It’s based on aria command line download utility, which is lightweight, super fast (support downloading from multi-sources in parallel), and supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, BitTorrent and Metalink.

Varia is written in Python programming language, and uses GTK4 + Libadwaita for its user interface, that’s modern and well integrated with GNOME Desktop.

In App Review download

Install GNOME Loupe Image Viewer & Set Default in Ubuntu 24.04

Last updated: March 4, 2024 — 1 Comment

Loupe is the core image viewer app for GNOME since version 45, but it’s so far not made default in Ubuntu.

It’s a fully adaptive image viewer that supports mobile form factors. It’s touch-friendly that supports 2-finger swipe left/right to navigate, 2-finger pinch/stretch to zoom out/in, and 2-finger gestures to rotate images.

Other features of Loupe include fast GPU accelerated image rendering, tiled rendering for vector graphics, sandboxed image decoding, and more.

In Howtos Gnome, image viewer

Use Locate command to Find Files (with Examples)

Last updated: January 9, 2025 — 6 Comments

This tutorial shows how to use locate command to quickly find files in your Linux system.

In Ubuntu Linux, the locate command is provided by the plocate package. It’s very fast command line search tool, that can find all files in the system matching the given pattern. It rarely needs to scan through its entire database, and most I/O is done asynchronously, but the results are synchronized.

Most importantly plocate is easy to use! I regularly use it to search app icon images that are in use in most pages of this website.

In Howtos Linux Command, locate, plocate

Ubuntu 24.04 Going to Drop the Games from Installer

Last updated: March 2, 2024 — 1 Comment

Ubuntu has a few offline games out-of-the-box. Now, the developer team is going to remove them from the installer in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

Since Ubuntu 23.10, Ubuntu Desktop no longer provides ‘Minimal installation‘ option in the installer. Instead, it’s “re-named” to “Default installation” with just the essentials, web browser and basic utilities. User can choose “Full installation” option for the office, media player, games, and other app packages that’s previously installed by default in old Ubuntu releases.

Just a few days ago, the desktop team proposed to remove the games from full installation, then made the decision with wider support.

Meaning that the game packages may be completely removed from the iso image, though they are still available to install in Ubuntu Software (App Center).

In News game, ubuntu 24.04

VS Code 1.87 Released with Voice Dictation in Editor

Last updated: March 1, 2024 — Leave a comment

Visual Studio Code announced version 1.87 as the new February 2024 release!

The release features voice dictation support in editor. With VS Code Speech extension installed, user can use voice to dictate directly into the editor.

It can be started by pressing Ctrl+Alt+V on keyboard, and stop via Escape key. Or, press and hold the key combination (Ctrl+Alt+V) to enable walky-talky mode, that the voice recognition stops as soon as the keys released.

The VS Code Speech extension now has 26 supported languages support. Each language comes as its own extension. And user can choose between them using accessibility.voice.speechLanguage setting.

Other changes in the release include:

Multi-cursor inline completions are previewed and applied at both the primary and the secondary cursor positions.
Rename suggestions from Copilot.
Pylance extension for Python support now has an Add Imports code action for adding missing imports.
Enable sticky scroll by defaul, and increase maximum display number from 10 to 20.
GitHub Copilot Chat suggests templates and features when adding dev container configuration files to a workspace
Side-by-side preview refactoring – Preview refactorings across files with multi diff editor.

In News programming, Visual Studio Code

Ptyxis – New Container-Focused Terminal Emulator for GNOME

Last updated: March 1, 2024 — Leave a comment

Prompt, the container-oriented terminal emulator, now is re-named to Ptyxis!

GNOME Developer Christian Hergert announced the Prompt terminal emulator a few months ago. It “marries the best of GNOME Builder’s seamless container support, the beauty of GNOME Text Editor, and the robustness of VTE.” described in the blog post.

Due to name confusion to other product, the terminal emulator now has a new name called “Ptyxis”, according to this post “The extremely nice people at Panic let me know they had a product that might be confused with Prompt and I agreed it could be confusing.”

image from blogs.gnome.org

In App Review terminal

How to Install OnlyOffice Desktop Editors in Ubuntu 22.04 | 24.04

Last updated: May 5, 2024 — Leave a comment

This is a step by step beginner’s guide shows how to install OnlyOffice Desktop Editors office suite and keep it up-to-date in Ubuntu 22.04. Though the title said for Ubuntu 22.04, it also works in Linux Mint (exclude Snap) and Debian.

OnlyOffice, formerly TeamLab, is a free office suite. The Desktop Editors is offline version, that’s made up of Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation, and PDF Form. Though, it supports collaborative editing by connecting to a cloud service.

The desktop editors is free and open-source (AGPL-3.0-only license) software works in Windows, Linux, and macOS. There’ also mobile version for iOS and Android, though called OnlyOffice Documents. It’s compatible with MS Office (OOXML) and OpenDocument (ODF) formats and supports DOC, DOCX, ODT, RTF, TXT, PDF, HTML, EPUB, XPS, DjVu, XLS, XLSX, ODS, CSV, PPT, PPTX, ODP, DOTX, XLTX, POTX, OTT, OTS, OTP, and PDF-A.

The office suite is available to install in Ubuntu in 4 different ways. Choose any one that you prefer: