HotShots is a screen capture tool with some editing features. It is particularly suitable for writing documentation (as used in the following chapters) but you can use it to highlight some details on a map image or what ever you want.
Because HotShots is written with Qt. Compare to Shtter, it has few dependencies and uses lower computer resources.
Features:
Grab current screen, all monitors (in case of multi-monitors configuration), current window or a part of the desktop.
Save the screenshot in multiple formats (PNG, JPG, BMP, …).
Automatically save the screenshot to clipboard, disk or launch the editor tool.
Automatically scale the screenshot to a given size.
Use “system” shortcuts to take a screenshot.
Add automatically some “post-effects” to the screenshot (drop shadow, rotation, border, …).
Add annotation items (text, arrows, rectable, …) to the snapshot.
Can be minimized to system tray and work in background.
Can be launch at system start-up (Windows).
Export edited image in multiple formats (PNG, JPG, BMP …).
Save/Restore edited image in proprietary format.
Send image directly to printer or to web service.
…
Install HotShots in PPA:
HotShots does not provide .deb package or apt repository for Ubuntu user so far, but you can always install the latest release from the launchpad PPA, works for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 12.04.
To add the PPA, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, paste the command below and hit enter:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps
After that, update package lists and install the screen capture:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install hotshots
Once installed, open it from Unity dash or application menu and enjoy!
Pragha is a Lightweight Music Player for GNU/Linux, based on Gtk, sqlite, and completely written in C, constructed to be fast, light, and simultaneously tries to be complete without obstructing the daily work.
History of Pragha:
Consonance, An excellent player emerged in the archlinux forums, was discontinued. The author, Sacamano said in his blog:
“Which doesn’t mean that it won’t be maintained. I would still be fixing bugs, but major feature additions are not in the pipeline, because I have completed all that I wanted to see in Consonance. It has been a fun project. :)”
Well.. Dissonance is the project to continue developing Consonance, and its result is Pragha Music Manager. A New reproducer of music.
Features:
Full integration with GTK+3, but always completely independent of gnome or xfce.
Two panel desing inspired on Amarok 1.4. Library and current playlist.
Library with multiple views, according tags or folder structure.
Search, filtering and queue songs on current playlist.
Playing and edit tag of mp3, m4a, ogg, flac, asf, wma, and ape files. Limited only by codecs installed and taglib version used.
Playlist management. Exporting M3U and read M3U, PLS, XSPF and WAX playlists.
Play audio CDs and identifies this with CDDB.
Playback control with command line and MPRIS2.
Native desktop notifications with libnotify.
Install Pragha in Ubuntu via PPA:
Seems that there’s no apt repository for Ubuntu users to make it easy to install the player, so I built the latest v1.2.2 into my PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.10 and their derivatives.
Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run the commands below one by one to add the PPA and install the player:
Sorry that the Ubuntu 12.04 build excludes libglyr (>= 1.0.1) which allows to get lyrics and artist bio over many internet services, and download missing album cover art from Last.fm. Please email me if you know how to build libglyr for Ubuntu 12.04 Precise.
This quick tip is going to show you how to display your laptop’s battery percentage and time remaining to Ubuntu 14.04 panel. So that your system tray area battery icon will look like this:
This can be done easily by doing a little changes through dconf Editor, install it via Software Center if you don’t find it in application menu or Unity dash.
1. Open dconf Editor. On the left side, navigate to com -> canonical -> indicator -> power.
2. Check the boxes that say “show-time” and “show-percentage” on the right.
Mailnag is a mail notification daemon for Gnome 3 and Unity that checks POP3 and IMAP servers for new mail.
On mail arrival it performs various actions provided by plugins. Mailnag comes with a set of desktop-independent default plugins for visual/sound notifications, script execution etc. and can be extended with additional plugins easily.
This notifier has an official PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04, which contains the latest Mailnag packages as well as Gnome Shell and Unity plugin.
Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run the commands below one by one to add the PPA and install the notifier:
UPDATE 2024: Corebird is discontinued and does NOT WORKS ANYMORE!!
Never heard of Corebird? It’s a native GTK+ Twitter client for Linux which has a modern and responsive design that looks kinda similar to the official Twitter app for Mac.
Corebird is a free and open source project created by Timm Bäder, AKA “baedert”. It carries the whole essential twitter features, such as Streaming of Tweets, Mentions/Notifications, Favorites, Direct Messaging, Lists, Filters and an integrated search.
With the advantage of the latest GTK+3 features, the application makes use of the new Header Bars. With the gstreamer and gstreamer plugins, corebird allows to view any videos (i.e. no vines and no twitter gifs).
The application is well intergrated with with GNOME Desktop. It supports GNOME Shell Application Menu and displays the number of Twitter notifications on the lockscreen.
Screenshots (ubuntu 14.04 64-bit):
Install Corebird in Ubuntu via PPA:
I’ve successfully built this twitter client into my PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04.
1. (For Ubuntu 14.04 only) Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run the commands below one by one to add the required PPAs:
QuiteRSS RSS/Atom news feeds reader got an update recently with a few improvements and bug fixes. Now it allows you to share news to LinkedIn, Blogger, Printer Friendly.
QuiteRSS is an open-source cross-platform RSS/Atom news feeds reader which aims to be quite fast and comfortable to user. It features embedded browser (Webkit core), feed and news filters, adblock, click to flash, import/export feeds (OPML-files), and more.
The latest v0.16.1 was released recently with below changes:
Added: Color adjustment of the feeds with disabled update
Added: Color adjustment of the alternating rows background of the news list
Fixed: Operating in some unix OS
Fixed: Display all columns if the new list despite of settings
Fixed: Parsing some feeds
Fixed: Application crash while shutdown
So now the reader allows users to share news to Evernote, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, Pocket, VK, LinkedIn, Blogger, Printer Friendly, or via Email.
Install / Upgrade QuiteRSS n Ubuntu:
The official Ubuntu PPA provides the latest builds for Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 12.04 and their derivatives.
Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run the commands below one by one will add the PPA and install the reader:
Pale Moon is an open source web browser based on Firefox that’s optimized for performance. It focuses on efficiency and ease of use, by leaving out unnecessary features and making optimizations, while maintaining compatibility with Firefox extensions and themes.
Features:
Optimized for modern processors
Firefox sourced: As safe as Mozilla’s flagship browser
Supported by a friendly, active community of users
Familiar, efficient, fully customizable interface (no Australis!)
Smooth and speedy page drawing and script processing
Support for Firefox extensions (add-ons) and themes
Uses slightly less memory because of disabled optional code
Support for SVG, Canvas and downloadable fonts
Extensive support for HTML5, CSS3 and WebGL
More customization and configuration options than Firefox
Able to use existing Firefox profiles with the migration tool
This browser, even though close to Firefox in the way it works, offers a different set of features than its sibling. For example, if you need accessibility features or integration of Windows’ parental controls, then Pale Moon may not be a good browser choice for you.
Install Pale Moon in Ubuntu:
1. Download the latest installer:
2. Extract the package and go into the result folder. Run the installer script from that folder:
3. Type in your user password when prompt and choose Install, Uninstall, or Upgrade the browser:
It will ask you some questions and finally download & install the browser in your system. Once Pale Moon is properly installed, you should see the below window:
This quick tutorial shows you how to make your VLC media player remember the position of the last played files with a plugin called srpos.
srpos plugin works for VLC 2.1.x in Windows and Linux. It allows you to automatically save and restore up to 100 last played files position.
How to install this plugin:
For Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 17 and their derivatives, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run commands below one by one to install it from PPA:
For Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 13.10 and their derivatives, you may consider upgrading VLC to the stable release v2.1.4 as the 2.0.x in their repositories are not supported. To do so, run:
Systemback is a simple backup and restore application for Ubuntu Linux that makes it easy to create backups of system and users configuration files. In case of problems you can easily restore the previous state of the system.
With systemback, you can create a Windows like system restore point by clicking on the Create new button.
It will take a few minutes backing up system files and user configuration data. User files such as documents, pictures and music are excluded. During this time, you can click the Interrupt button to cancel the process.
Once you created a restore point, it will be list in the main window with a name looks like “2014-7-11, 20.50.47” (see the first picture). Choose it and you’re able to click the System restore button. Then you can easily restore your system status to the time you create the point.
Under the function menu, click the green arrow button, you’ll see a button Schedule which allows you to create restore points in a scheduled time.
Besides creating restore points, the tool also allows to:
Copy system from one partition to another
Create new user, set root password, change hostname.
Create a Live CD/DVD/USB from current system with or without user data.
System file repair, Grub2 repair.
Upgrade your Ubuntu to next release
Install Systemback in Ubuntu 14.04:
The latest stable v1.0 (qt5 port) is available in the developer’s PPA for Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04. A old stable version is also available for Ubuntu 12.04.
Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run the commands below one by one will add the PPA and install Systemback:
Nvidia has just announced the release of driver 340.24 for Linux with numerous improvements and fixes. One of the exciting news is the initial support for G-SYNC monitors.
Nvidia 340.24 was released on July 8th, 2014 with following changes:
Fixed a bug that prevented 3D Vision stereo and ultra low motion blur modes from working on G-SYNC capable monitors in some cases.
Fixed a bug that caused the “Allow G-SYNC” checkbox to be displayed in nvidia-settings even if the GPUs in the system are not capable of G-SYNC.
Fixed a kernel crash when running some applications with IOMMU functionality enabled.
Fixed a floating point exception in the OpenGL driver when running “Risk of Rain” under Wine.
Made various improvements and corrections to the information reported to GL applications via the KHR_debug and ARB_debug_output extensions.
Fixed a bug that caused GLX applications which simultaneously create drawables on multiple X servers to crash when swapping buffers.
Updated nvidia-settings to report all valid names for each target when querying target types, e.g. `nvidia-settings -q gpus`.
Added support for controlling the availability of Fast Approximate Antialiasing (FXAA) on a per-application basis via the new __GL_ALLOW_FXAA_USAGE environment variable and the corresponding GLAllowFXAAUsage application profile key. See the README for details.
Fixed a bug where indirect rendering could become corrupted on system configurations that disallow writing to executable memory.
Updated the nvidia-settings Makefiles to allow nvidia-settings to be dynamically linked against the host system’s libjansson. This option can be enabled by setting the NV_USE_BUNDLED_LIBJANSSON Makefile variable to 0.Please note that nvidia-settings requires libjansson version 2.2 or later.
Removed the runlevel check from nvidia-installer: the installation problems formerly associated with runlevel 1 no longer apply.
Improved support for running the NVIDIA driver in configurations where writing to executable memory is disallowed.Driver optimizations that require writing to executable memory can be forcefully disabled using the new __GL_WRITE_TEXT_SECTION environment variable.See the README for more details.
Fixed an X driver bug that caused gamma ramp updates of the green channel at depth 15, on some recent GPUs, to be ignored.
Fixed a regression, introduced in the 340.17 public beta release, that caused the NVIDIA X driver to access freed memory when exiting a GLX application that used either of the GLX_NV_video_out or GLX_NV_present_video extensions.
Install Nvidia 340.24 in Ubuntu:
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you’re just looking for a working drive for your Nvidia card in Ubuntu Linux, please search for and install nvidia-current in Ubuntu Software Center.
Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, do:
1. Remove the previous installed proprietary driver and install the latest updates-dev package. Then restart your computer
