Ubuntu Linux

Tor Browser, previously known as Tor Browser Bundle, is a web browser that protects your privacy while you are surfing the Internet. It's a modified version of Mozilla Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) that includes TorButton, TorLauncher, NoScript and HTTPS Everywhere Firefox extensions, and the Tor proxy.
 

This article explains how to use FFmpeg to extract the audio stream from a video, either without re-encoding (keeping the original format), or converting the resulting audio file to CBR (constant bitrate) or VBR (variable bitrate) MP3 or Ogg Vorbis.
ffmpeg is a very fast video and audio converter that can also grab from a live audio/video source. It can also convert between arbitrary sample rates and resize video on the fly with a high quality polyphase filter. FFmpeg is a powerful tool that can do almost anything you can imagine with multimedia files. In this article, we are interested in using it to convert files, so we won't be taking a deep dive into its entire feature set. Before we look at using FFmpeg, first we need to take a quick look at what a media file exactly is.

Read more to see how to extract audio from video (with or without re-encoding) using ffmpeg from the command line.

Since Oracle Java 11 can't be directly downloaded from Oracle any more, the installer no longer works, so I created a new installer that requires the user to create an Oracle account, download the Oracle Java 11 .tar.gz archive (the same version as the installer), and place the archive in /var/cache/oracle-jdk11-installer-local/. After this, you can install the oracle-java11-installer-local package, and it will set up Oracle Java 11 for you on Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

This article on Linux Uprising explains how to use the new installer for Oracle Java 11, to install the JDK using a local .tar.gz that you've manually downloaded from the Oracle website, using your Oracle signin.

This article presents 2 tools for converting PDF documents to editable text on Linux, using a graphical tool (Calibre) and a command line tool (pdftotext). 

The GUI tool used to convert PDF to text presented in this article is Calibre. This application can also perform file conversions from the command line, but since that requires installing the full GUI, the article mentions a different, specialized command line tool for converting PDF to text called... pdftotext.

You can protect your Windows computer from DNS spoofing by using DNSCrypt Proxy. DNSCrypt is a protocol that authenticates communication between a DNS client and a DNS resolver, preventing DNS spoofing. The easiest way of using DNSCrypt Proxy in Microsoft Windows is by using a tool called Simple DNSCrypt Proxy. Read more about it on FOSS Uprising.

"install-java.sh" is an installation script for setting up Oracle Java Development Kit on Debian based Linux Operating Systems. While the developer says this is for Debian-based Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, elementary OS, etc.), it also works on Fedora. It might also work on other Linux distributions but this was not tested.

LibreOffice can create a fillable form document, which can then be exported to PDF, creating an interactive forms PDF. 

PDF is a very popular format for static document that doesn’t require changes. You may also have seen PDF files that come with form that you can fill in. In case you are wondering how you can create a PDF file with fillable form, here is one easy way you can do so, and it is free of charge, and on any platform (Windows, macOS or Linux), using LibreOffice writer.

Small python-gtk application, which helps the user to merge or split pdf documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive graphical interface.

PDFArranger is very simple and easy to use, with only a few buttons in its toolbar, to open a PDF document, save the current modifications, zoom in or out, rotate or delete PDF document pages. To rearrange the pages in a PDF file, open the PDF document you want to modify, and drag & drop the pages to change their order.

DNSCrypt is a network protocol which authenticates and encrypts Domain Name System (DNS) traffic between the user's computer and recursive name servers. It turns regular DNS traffic into encrypted DNS traffic that's protected from spying, spoofing, or man-in-the-middle attacks, thus improving the user's online security and privacy. Compared to v1, the 2.0 series of DNSCrypt Proxy, which had its first stable release back in February, was rewritten in Go, has support for DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTP, and it supports DNS caching. It also has a new configuration file format that's not compatible with the old v1.
 

Some time ago Dropbox began to warn me about supporting ext4 as FS only.  The base file system needs to be ext4, and specifically not ecryptfs. i.e. if your home folder is encrypted, you need to put the Dropbox folder someplace else, eg. a separate ext4 partition.

To overcome this, you can use an utility called dropbox-filesystem-fix. This makes your Dropbox folder appear as if it's on an unencrypted Ext4 filesystem, no matter what filesystem you use, and you don't have to mount anything, you just have to run Dropbox with with a dropbox-filesystem library (LD_PRELOAD).

TLP is an advanced power management tool for optimizing battery life on laptops running Linux. Its default configuration is usually enough to see an improvement in battery life, however, TLP offers a wide range of configuration options which can be changed by editing its configuration file.
 

Lutris is a tool that helps you install and manage games on Linux. It supports native and Windows-only games (by using Wine and DXVK), as well as emulators.

Steam included Proton recently, a Wine-based compatibility layer that allows playing Windows-only games on Linux. But that's for Steam games. For others, like Blizzard games for example, you can use Lutris to make playing Windows games on Linux easier.

This article explains how to install a Chromium development build which includes a patch that enables VA-API on Linux, bringing support for GPU accelerated video decoding, which should significantly decrease the CPU usage when watching HD videos online. The instructions cover only Intel and Nvidia graphics cards, as I don't have an ATI/AMD graphics card to try this, nor do I have experience with such graphics cards.

You may think this is actually quite easy, simply enable the 'override the software rendering list' option in chrome://flags and then look in chrome://gpu and hardware acceleration is enabled. That is not actually the case. chrome://gpu shows as if video acceleration is enabled, but the 'override software rendering list' option does nothing because the Chromium devs decided that some users might enable this option, then forget about it, and experience issues due to it. You can see for yourself by enabling this option, than playing a HD video on YouTube - you should see a very high CPU usage despite enabling this option. This is why you'll need to use Chromium with a VA-API patch added, to actually enable hardware acceleration.

If you're looking for a quick way to download subtitles from OpenSubtitles.org from your Linux desktop or server, give OpenSubtitlesDownload.py a try. This neat Python tool can be used as a Nautilus, Nemo or Caja script, or from the command line.

OpenSubtitlesDownload.py has quite a few cool features, including support for more than 60 languages, and it can query both multiple subtitle languages and videos in the same time (so it supports mass subtitle search and download). The subtitles search is done by precisly identifying your video files by computing unique movie hash sums. This way, you have more chance to find the exact subtitles for your videos, avoiding synchronization problems between the subtitles and the soundtrack.

Some applications and games built with OpenGL support and packaged as Flatpak fail to start with proprietary Nvidia drivers. This article explains how to get such Flatpak applications or games them to start, without installing the open source drivers (Nouveau).

The idea of using application containers in GNOME was first proposed in 2013 by Lennart Poettering (a rather annoying fella), who published an article about it in 2014. Developed as part of the freedesktop.org project (formerly known as X Desktop Group or XDG), it was originally called xdg-app.

Hackers gained access to the GitHub repositories and tampered the source code of Gentoo by introducing a malicious script to delete all of your files. 

“Today 28 June at approximately 20:20 UTC unknown individuals have gained control of the Github Gentoo organization and modified the content of repositories as well as pages there. We are still working to determine the exact extent and to regain control of the organization and its repositories. All Gentoo code hosted on GitHub should for the moment be considered compromised. “

ood news for any merciless warmongers amongst you: you’ll soon be able to play ‘Total War: WARHAMMER II’ on Linux.

Games porting powerhouse™ Feral Interactive has announced that is is bringing the acclaimed strategy title to Linux and macOS later this year.

New Ubuntu 18.04 users might notice that the suspend button is missing from the Gnome Shell user menu, which has only 3 options: Settings, Lock Screen and Power Off.

So where is the Suspend button in Ubuntu 18.04? Well, you need to hold down the Alt key while opening the user menu and the power off button turns into a suspend button which you can click to suspend your computer.

Having Avidemux on Flathub is a much needed addition, since it was removed from Debian and Ubuntu (with Ubuntu 16.04), leaving users to rely on building the software from source, or using third-party repositories, which is not always a good idea for audio / video software (because in some cases they require newer dependencies like FFmpeg and others, which may affect repository-installed apps).

Avidemux is a free open source software for video editing and processing, created for simple operations, that's available for Windows, macOS and Linux. Use it to perform video editing operations like cutting, encoding, filtering (apply visual effects), add audio to video files (multiplexing or muxing) or extract audio from some video.

Rufus is a live USB media creation tool. The application runs on Windows and it can be used to make a bootable installation USB flash drives from Windows or Linux ISO files as well as disk images.

Rufus 3.0 was released recently and it includes a redesigned user interface, SSL used for all external downloads (the application needs to download some files in some situations to make the bootable USB drives), and a few other minor improvements and bug fixes.