Ubuntu Linux

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 853 for the week of August 11 - 17, 2024. In this Issue

• First Oracular Oriole test rebuild
• Oracular Oriole (to be 24.10) now in Feature Freeze
• AppArmor user namespace creation restrictions cause many applications to crash with SIGTRAP
• Ubuntu Stats
• Hot in Support
• Michigan LoCo Virtual Meetup August 25, 2024
• LoCo Events
• Event Report - DebConf 24
• Anbox Cloud 1.23.0 has been released
• Winners!: Oracular Oriole Wallpaper Competition
• Proposal: Add the moderator bot and Ubuntu CoC links to subspaces of the Ubuntu Community space
• Ubuntu Desktop’s 24.10 Dev Cycle - Part 4: August Update
• Netplan v1.1 released ...
• And much more!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/993060

With this First Look, we will be taking a look at “Tiling Shell”, an open-source window tiling solution for GNOME-equipped systems.

Some key highlights of Tiling Shell include:

• Easy multi-monitor operation.
• Windows 11-like snap assistant.
• Can be used on GNOME 40-46.
• Supports both X11 and Wayland.

The level of control it gives is impressive, there are options to tweak the inner/outer gaps between windows, enable snap assistant, configure the tiling system, add keybinds for window management, and more.

In terms of the layout choices, the possibilities are endless (literally), there are some handy pre-configured ones that are usable. But, the main highlight is the layout editor, which is the star of the show.

As for how the multi-monitor experience is, Tiling Shell doesn't disappoint in that matter. It's easy to tile windows between workspaces and displays using the snap assistant, I didn't feel that this behavior was an add-on, it felt quite native to me.

Prior to the Ubuntu 24.10 feature freeze, the GNOME 47 beta has landed for Ubuntu 24.10 daily builds. The GNOME 47 desktop will be providing the out-of-the-box experience on Ubuntu 24.10. This was expected to happen and great to see it carried out given all the great GNOME 47 changes upstream from Wayland enhancements and more.

Canonical engineers have also continued spending a lot of time on further enhancing the Snap experience on Ubuntu for these sandboxed apps. Ubuntu 24.10 now has progress bars in the dock for Snaps that refresh in the background, improved Snapd handling for the latest NVIDIA graphics driver to behave better with the Steam Snap, seeded Snap tracks for desktop apps, and better Snap track migration handling on Ubuntu upgrades. Ubuntu 24.10's App Center has also seen improvements with its "Manage" page, among other refinements.

Discourse Announcement: Ubuntu Desktop’s 24.10 Dev Cycle - Part 4: August Update

Beginning with Ubuntu 24.10, the Ubuntu on X.Org session support is now split off into its own separate package, aptly called "ubuntu-session-xsession". This is similar to what has already been pursued by Debian and other Linux distributions for splitting up the X.Org session support into a separate build. This can be useful if wanting to remove X.Org dependencies from your system or otherwise just trying to maintain a modern Wayland-minded Linux desktop without any extra legacy support or cruft.

The ubuntu-session is set to recommend "ubuntu-session-xsession" and thus by default for now this Ubuntu X.Org session support will continue to be found out-of-the-box for those needing to fall-back to it on their systems or otherwise just preferring the X.Org session.

Bluetooth headphones, Bluetooth mouse, Bluetooth keyboard. Bluetooth is part of our wireless computing life.

There is one problem, though. It is not always easy to know when the Bluetooth devices needs to be charged or its battery should be changed.

This is why I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Ubuntu 24.04 displayed the battery status of the connected Bluetooth devices.

This is a handy feature. It allows me to charge my devices timely. Of course, this is a GNOME desktop feature. Other desktop environments may or may not have this handy feature.

Ubuntu 24.10 is released in October and will mark the 20th anniversary of Ubuntu. So it’s only fitting that the release offer a few ‘easter eggs’ in honour if its past.

Ubuntu 24.10 includes the GNOME 47 desktop, and among the new features in GNOME 47 is accent colour support.

But with upstream GNOME adding accent colour support officially, Ubuntu doesn’t need to patch it in, so will migrate to the “official” approach (albeit retaining most, though not all, of the Yaru accent colour palette, defaulting to orange as one would expect).

For Ubuntu 24.10, ‘warty brown’ will be added to the pool of accent colours you can pick from, with the colour being applied to UI elements such as toggles, switches, and hovers, and a number of Yaru icons, including folders.

Ubuntu developers also add “support for playing a startup sound” to GNOME Shell 47, and include the ”warty startup sound” in the Yaru sounds package for when the option is enabled.

It’s time to vote for your favorite Oracular Oriole Wallpapers! Thank you to all the incredible artists, photographers and pixel wizards who shared your talent with us! We’ve got some superb submissions to celebrate our 20th anniversary! The photographers in our community provided some really stunning shots and our digital artists never fail to dazzle with their skills. Now it’s your turn to help choose which artwork will make it into the final release of Ubuntu 24.10!

The first Ubuntu 24.04 point release won’t be released this week, as initially planned.

Ubuntu developers had been aiming to release Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS on Thursday, August 19th, but has been delayed due to ‘high-impact upgrade bugs’.

As a result, Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS is now due for release on Thursday, August 29th, two weeks later than initially planned.

• Official Announcement: Ubuntu 24.04.1 point-release delayed until August 29

• Tracking Document: Noble Numbat (24.04.1 LTS) Point-Release Status Tracking

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS users experiencing issues setting up Fastmail and mailbox.org providers in GNOME Online Accounts to access cloud files, calendars, and/or contacts will be pleased to hear a fix is inbound.

Ubuntu have now packaged the gnome-online-accounts 3.50.4 update for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and uploaded it to the ‘proposed’ updates channel for noble to allow for proper testing.

This update also bring a number of other fixes, including buffs to improve ‘the usability of new Microsoft 365 provider’ – aka the to sign-in to if you want to access OneDrive files through the Nautilus file manager as a virtual filesystem.

Merge Request: goabackend: fixes for generic WebDAV providers

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/956230

Canonical’s announced a major shift in its kernel selection process for future Ubuntu releases. An “aggressive kernel version commitment policy” pivot will see it ship the latest upstream kernel code in development at the time of a new Ubuntu release.

Original announcement: Kernel Version Selection for Ubuntu Releases

I was previously using PopOS! 22.04 on my tuxedo laptop and I'd installed on it Howdy to take advantage of the IR camera and have a windows hello alike face recognition feature.

Everything was working fine, but after some time GNOME 46 and its new goodies were too tempting to stick with Pop's old GNOME version (at least for me) and therefore I switched to Ubuntu 24.04

However, when I tried to install howdy using the PPAs as I did with Pop I noticed it wasn't working because of some changes that were made regarding on how Python is managed, and I couldn't find a solution for that. Looking at howdy's GitHub issues, there are a lot of them talking about this problem that seems to be started with 23.x versions already, but having so many issues created a bit too much confusion to me and I didn't manage to find a working solution from there.

Is there anyone here using Howdy on Ubuntu 24.04? How have you managed to install it?

Can someone explain to me why the fuck I should pay for installing packages that are available in other distros?

WTF Ubuntu???

I'm getting intermittent audio cutouts on my machine. Audio will be playing fine but will then cut out for anywhere from ~0.5-5.0 seconds, then come back fine. What's interesting is that other sounds may continue to play just fine while it happens. For example, playing a game there will be background noises and music, but the dialog will just drop out a few words here and there while the background sounds and music continue playing fine. It also happens on "single track" audio sources like watching a video, so it isn't exclusively a multi-track issue.

This issue only started on my new computer that I built while keeping everything else the same (cabling, A/V receiver, display, etc.) Old computer was also running 22.04.4, so I suspect it might be something with the GPU in the new machine.

Ubuntu 22.04.4 Gigabyte AMD 7900 GRE

Trying to search for similar issues but I'm coming up with no good leads. The only one that looked like it may have been in the same realm suggested changing the refresh rate from 120hz to 119.88hz, but alas, that didn't work. Any suggestions for trying to narrow down the issue or some things I can try to troubleshoot?

It's a known bug from upstream mutter. A fix is being worked on and there's a PPA with the updated packages by the Ubuntu developer working on the fix. It resolved the problem on my end.

One would expect https://ubuntuforums.org/ but that forum is so ancient, it's still asking for ICQ IDs in your profile. Not sure how many are using it. I still asked there but I'm not sure if it's the best location.

OK, I'm a bit confused at the moment. I was ware that Ubuntu is selling subscriptions. I was aware that some security updates required subscription plans; BUT I was under the impression this was for extended support (i.e. after 5 years for a LTS version) or maybe for less frequently used packages beyond what the core distribution ships with.

Now, i get a pop up that looks like the regular update screen, but lists updates I cannot install. So, essentially a sales pitch for Pro. This sounds like exactly the reason, why I'm no longer on Windows.

Can I securely run Ubuntu Desktop and Server, current LTS, without paying?

(crosspost: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/10654646)

I'd like to do a full disk encryption. I realize I cannot do this since I've already installed ubuntu, so I'm fine with doing a fresh reinstall.

The problem is when I get to the step of selecting "wipe entire disk and install ubuntu", then click on Advanced settings, the option for full disk encryption is greyed out. It is the only option that is greyed out, I am able to select the other three.

What gives here? I'm wiping the disk and installing from a usb so why wouldn't it allow me to encrypt? The only thing I can think of is I might have some strange setting wrong in the BIOS, but I'm not a computer guy.

The problem: Each time I try to execute the sudo command, and type the correct password, it rejects the password.

I am at the end of my rope with internet searches, I’m close to just wiping and trying an operating system reinstall.

I am new to linux and I recently installed ubuntu 22.04.3. I haven’t been able to access the sudo command since the install. I’m currently attempting to install firewalld, but I’m going to need this command for other things as well and I’m starting to wonder if there is something wrong with my install or worse.

Many of the troubleshooting techniques I’ve come across contain a catch 22 in that they require the sudo command to solve this, which I am unable to execute.

Edit: Thanks to everyone who helped me with this issue. Update. I tried a first disk erase and install of ubuntu. During the first attempt I went through the software updates and I did a few things like changing firefox settings before attempting to change my root password. I was unable to change the root password when I attempted to.

Attempt #2. I reformatted and immediately tried to set my root password and this time it worked, and I have had no issues since. So take all of that for what it’s worth.

The most annoying thing for me was the huge internet data usage by snap updates but it is better now.

Even though it showed 300mb for a Firefox update, but only consumed 80mb and everything updated and working wonderfully ! 😅 😍 👑

The New app store is beautiful 🙌

(just sharing my experience 😅 )

@ubuntu #ubuntu #snaps #appstore #snapd #gnome

So, I'm trying to make a QEMU/KVM VM in Ubuntu WSL with 3d accel. So far I haven't found too much on the topic of 3d accel without using virt-manager. My goal is to achieve boot up of a debian minimal qcow2 image without using anything but QEMU/KVM, so no virt-manager or GNOME Boxes.

The script so far:

Edit : IT IS "FIXED" BY THE NEW UPDATES. Thank You Devs ❤️

Did anyone face this issue on Ubuntu 23.10 beta ? broke my dual boot ! 😭😓😥 But on 22.04, it's working fine! I'm not complaining, just wanted to know.😟 @ubuntu

Pidgin doesn't work anymore since I upgraded from 22.10 to 23.04 today. I get the following error when I try to open it in Terminal:

*** stack smashing detected ***: terminated

Aborted (core dumped)

If I try to open it from the launcher it doesn't open and I get no error at all. Any suggestions on how to fix the problem? I apparently have version 2.14.12 installed.