Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

Unity To Get An Option To Always Show The Menus [Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet]

Unity developer +Marco Trevisan is working on some tweaks for Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet and among them, there's a fix for a three year old bug related to Unity's menus. 

Marco's work involves adding an option to always show the Unity menus (in Unity, the menus are currently displayed on mouseover). Furthermore, this option will work with both the regular Appmenu / global menu, displayed on the top Unity panel, as well as LIM (locally integrated menus), displayed in the application titlebar:

Ubuntu 15.05 Vivid Vervet Menu always visible

GTK 3.14, Nautilus 3.14 Land In Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet [Quick Update]

Quick update for Ubuntu users planning to use Ubuntu 15.04: GTK 3.14 has landed in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet. And of course, the default Ubuntu themes, Ambiance and Radiance, have been updated with GTK 3.14 support.

Furthermore, Nautilus, an application that wasn't updated in quite a while and was still at version 3.10, has been updated to version 3.14:

Paper: New Material Design Inspired GTK Theme

Paper is a new material design inspired GTK theme, which is currently in beta. "Its design is mostly flat with a minimal use of shadows for depth", mentions its website, and it was developed primarily for the GNOME (Shell) and other desktops that make use of header bars.

Ideally, you'll need a complete GNOME 3.14 / 3.12 desktop to see what Paper is all about, since the theme uses custom colors for header bars / client-side decoration apps.

Paper GTK theme
Paper under Ubuntu GNOME 14.10

Get A Global Menu In MATE 1.8 Or 1.10 With TopMenu (PPA For Ubuntu And Linux Mint)

You may also want to see: Alternative Global Menu For MATE And Xfce: Vala Panel AppMenu [PPA]

One of the most requested MATE features is the addition of a global menu applet. However, such an applet (called TopMenu) already exists, though it's not available in any PPA and that prevents many Ubuntu / Linux Mint users from installing it.

To make it easier to install, I've packed TopMenu in a PPA for Ubuntu 14.04 (requires using Ubuntu MATE or upgrading to MATE 1.8 via PPA), 15.04 and 15.10 as well as Linux Mint 17 or 17.1 (MATE edition, obviously).

TopMenu is compatible with MATE 1.8 and 1.10 (a MATE 1.8/1.10 panel applet is shipped) and it fully supports GTK2. According to its homepage, GTK3 is partially supported (I didn't encounter any functionality issues in my test) and there are additional plugins for Qt4 and Mozilla apps (Firefox and Thunderbird). I should also mention that unlike Unity's AppMenu, TopMenu doesn't autohide and it's always visible when an application is focused.

Here are a few TopMenu screenshots taken under Ubuntu MATE:

TopMenu - GTK2 app

Audacious Switches Back To GTK2, Adds New Qt-Based User Interface [Audacious 3.6 Alpha 1]

Audacious is a fast audio player that focuses on high audio quality and low resource usage, which comes with a pretty large plugin list and until now, it shipped with two interfaces: a GTK+ interface and a Winamp 2.x like interface (and so, it supports Winamp 2.x skins).

As we pointed out a while back, the Audacious developers aren't very happy  with GTK3 and for the latest Audacious 3.6 alpha 1, released recently, they've switched back to GTK2 by default. 

Also, since the long-term goal is to completely switch to Qt, Audacious 3.6 alpha 1 includes a new Qt5-based user interface which is already usable, but not as feature-rich as the GTK+ interface. The new Qt interface can be installed alongside the already existing GTK+ and Winamp Classic interfaces.

Canonical Announces Snappy Ubuntu Core, A Transactionally Updated Flavor For The Cloud

Canonical announced "snappy" Ubuntu Core yesterday, a new cloud-optimized Ubuntu edition that uses transactional updates.

Fedora 21 Available For Download


Fedora 21 has just been released, featuring the latest stable GNOME 3.14 along with other interesting changes.

With this release, Fedora is available in three flavors: server, cloud and workstation and below, we'll take a quick look at what's new in Fedora 21 Workstation.


Nuvola Player 2.5 Released With Spotify Web Player And Grooveshark Mobile (HTML5) Support

Nuvola Player 2.5 was released yesterday, bringing support for new services such as Spotify Web Player, Grooveshark Mobile (HTML5) and others, as well as improvements for some already existing services.

Nuvola Player 2.5

Ubuntu Developer Tools Center Renamed To Ubuntu Make, Sees New Release

Ubuntu Developer Tools Center, a project to allow easy installation of common developer tools, has reached version 0.2. With this release, the project was renamed to Ubuntu Make, based on name proposals from the community.

Android Studio Ubuntu Make

Install Cinnamon 2.4 (Stable) In Ubuntu 14.04 Via PPA

Cinnamon 2.4 Ubuntu 14.04

Quick update for Ubuntu 14.04 users who want to try the latest Cinnamon 2.4 (stable): the two Cinnamon stable PPAs we covered a while back were updated recently with the latest Cinnamon 2.4 (2.4.5).

QLLauncher: Quake Live Launcher For Linux

QLLauncher is a Quake Live launcher for Linux which comes with various tweaks that should improve the game's performance. Furthermore, the tool supports downloading and updating Quake Live along with other useful features.


How To Get Flash And H.264 To Work In Opera Browser (Ubuntu 14.04, 14.10 and 15.04)

Opera 26 (stable) was released for Linux today and if you've tried it, you might have noticed that, at least on a pretty fresh Ubuntu installation, Flash and H.264 don't work.

So here's how to get Flash and H.264 (used for instance by the YouTube HTML5 player) to work with Opera on Ubuntu. The instructions below should work for all Opera (26 or newer) channels: stable, beta and developer.

Opera 26 Released, First Stable Linux Release In More Than A Year

Opera 26 (based on Chromium 39) was released today for Windows, Mac and Linux. This is the first stable Opera version available for Linux since Opera 12.16, which was released almost a year and a half ago.

Opera browser Linux

Syncthing GTK Gets HTTPS Support, Syncthing Daemon Auto-Updater And More

Syncthing GTK was updated recently with quite a few improvements, such as HTTPS support on Linux, an auto-updater for the Syncthing binary and much more.

Syncthing GTK is a GTK3 & Python GUI for Syncthing, which includes a tray icon / Ubuntu AppIndicator. In case you're not familiar with Syncthing, this is a cross-platform peer-to-peer file synchronization client/server application written in Go, similar to BitTorrent Sync. It can be used to synchronize files between computers however, unlike BitTorrent Sync, Syncthing is open source. 

For more information, see our article on Syncthing.

Syncthing GTK