Saturday, October 28, 2017

LibreELEC 8.2.0



The LibreELEC project develops a minimal operating system which is dedicated to running the Kodi media centre. The project's latest release, LibreELEC 8.2.0, introduces changes to Samba, dropping the SMB1 protocol and supporting SMB2 and SMB3. "The Kodi SMB client now defaults to SMB3 connections but can fail to negotiate SMB3 with old Samba (NAS) versions. A new option in Kodi Settings > Services > SMB client > allows SMB2 or SMB1 to be forced for compatibility with legacy SMB servers. The embedded Samba server defaults to and supports only SMB2/SMB3 connections. The LibreELEC Settings add-on allows the minimum protocol version to be changed, e.g. to enable SMB1 for compatibility with legacy SMB clients. It also supports GUI configuration of WORKGROUP name. Samba detects v3 /storage/.config/samba.conf configurations and ignores them to avoid the Samba service failing on startup. If this happens Samba starts with a default v4 configuration. Custom Samba configurations must be updated to use the new Samba 4.x base template (samba.conf.sample)." Further information is available in the project's release announcement. Download: LibreELEC-Generic.x86_64-8.2.0.img.gz (212MB).

YouTube-DL GUI 0.4 Ships With New User Interface, More [PPA]

 
After two years since the previous version, a new YouTube-DL GUI (YouTube-DLG) version was made available for download recently. The new 0.4 version ships with a a new user interface, easier format and save path selection and more.
 
 


YouTube-DL GUI is, like its name suggests, a graphical user interface for the powerful command line tool youtube-dl, available for Linux and Windows. In case you're not familiar with youtube-dl, this is a popular tool that allows downloading videos from YouTube and around 1000 other websites.

YouTube-DL GUI features include:
  • options to select the video and audio format;
  • post-processing options such as: extract audio from video file, embed thumbnail in audio file, add metadata, select audio quality;
  • can embed subtitles into the video file (mp4 only);
  • configurable filename format for the downloaded audio/video file;
  • supports authentication;
  • allows using a proxy;
  • can specify user agent and referrer;
  • supports passing extra youtube-dl command line options.

YouTUbe-DL GUI automatically downloads (and updates) the youtube-dl binary so you don't have to worry about having an old youtube-dl that no longer works. By default, the binary is saved under the ~/.config/youtube-dlg directory.

For post-processing, the application uses FFmpeg, so you'll need this installed for some options, like merging DASH files, etc.

Changes in YouTube-DL GUI 0.4:
  • new user interface;
  • easier format selection (now available directly in the main UI, and not in the app settings);
  • easier save path selection (now available directly in the main UI, and not in the app settings);
  • added new options to move item in queue, pause, play, delete, pause, etc.;
  • added new supported youtube-dl options: -v, --ignore-config, --hls-prefer-native, --no-mtime, etc.;
  • added option for embedding thumbnails to audio files;
  • support for new output templates;
  • added generic video formats (3gp, mp4, webm, etc..);
  • added dynamic format options: the "default" format option in the UI downloads the best available format ("best" option in youtube-dl), while setting the default format as well as enabling the 'Extract audio from video file' option will download the best audio ("bestaudio" option in youtube-dl) available;
  • post-processing:
    • calculate final size of post process files;
    • extract final extension after merging process;
    • extract final extension after recording process;
  • bug fixes and various other changes.

For more information, see the YouTube-DL GUI changelog.

Using the new YouTube-DL GUI is fairly easy. Simple enter the URL (or multiple URLs) in the "Enter URLs below" box, then click "Add". To start downloading, click the start button (cloud icon in the bottom right hand side corner of the app window).
 

Install YouTube-DL GUI in Ubuntu or Linux Mint

 

YouTube-DL GUI is available in the main WebUpd8 PPA, for Ubuntu 17.04 and 16.04 / Linux Mint 18.x. To add the PPA and install the application, use the following commands:

 

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt update
sudo apt install youtube-dlg
 
 
If you don't want to add the PPA, you can grab the deb from HERE. Important: you'll also need the twodict package (new dependency), which is available HERE.

The latest YouTube-DL GUI doesn't work in Ubuntu 14.04 because it requires wxPython 3 which is not available in the official Trusty repositories. The old version still works though.
 

Ubuntu Studio 17.10


Ross Gammon has announced the release of Ubuntu Studio 17.10, the latest version of the project's official Ubuntu variant designed for audio, video and graphics professionals. This is routine release with the usual round of software updates and a new experimental feature for improved performance during recordings: "We are happy to announce the release of our latest version, Ubuntu Studio 17.10 'Artful Aardvark'. As a regular version, it will be supported for 9 months. Since it's just out, you may experience some issues, so you might want to wait a bit before upgrading. The Ubuntu Studio Controls package has been updated to provide an experimental option to set the CPU governor to performance mode. This is important for recording. At the moment, the setting is not persistent, and needs to be reset at every reboot. BIOS settings may need to be changed for this setting to take effect. Audio - removed zynjacku as this software is no longer maintained by the original developer." See the release announcement and release notes for further information. Ubuntu Studion 17.10 is available for download as a 2.7GB live DVD image: ubuntustudio-17.10-dvd-amd64.iso (2,736MB, SHA256, signature, torrent, pkglist). Also available from OSDisc.

Lubuntu 17.10





Simon Quigley has announced the release of Lubuntu 17.10, a desktop distribution built from Ubuntu packages, but featuring the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE) which is suitable for older computers: "Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, Lubuntu 17.10 has been released. With the code name 'Artful Aardvark', Lubuntu 17.10 is the 13th release of Lubuntu, with support until July of 2018. What has improved since 17.04? We now ship with Linux kernel 4.13; general bug-fix release as we prepare to switch to LXQt; LXDE components have been updated with bug fixes; the artwork has received an update; the latest release of Audacious, version 3.9, is included by default; Hardinfo has been updated to the latest upstream snapshot." Also available is the Lubuntu "Next" variant, an experimental build of Lubuntu with the LXQt desktop: "Alongside Lubuntu 17.10 featuring LXDE, the Lubuntu team is proud to announce an early adopter's release of Lubuntu Next, featuring the LXQt 0.11.1 desktop environment which is the Qt 5 port of LXDE." Read the release announcement and release notes for more details. Download (SHA256, signature, pkglist): lubuntu-17.10-desktop-amd64.iso (921MB, torrent), lubuntu-17.10-desktop-i386.iso (929MB, torrent). Also available from OSDisc.

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Beta 1


Frederic Crozat has announced the availability of the first beta release of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15, an enterprise-class Linux distribution based on openSUSE. This will be SUSE's first major release since October 2014 when SLE 12 was made available: "We are happy to announce our first beta release for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation Extension (SLE-WE), SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability (SLE-HA). SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Beta will be our new major release designed for IT Transformation. SLE 15 is developed with both 'Traditional Infrastructure' and 'Software-Defined Infrastructure' in mind, thus significant and major changes from the previous SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 are made to address both worlds in a more elegant and simpler way. Five key objectives for SLE 15: address traditional and containerized infrastructure and provide a common code base for traditional and agile data center; install all SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 products starting from a single medium...." See the release announcement and release notes for detailed information about the new product, known issues and bug reporting procedures. Interested beta testers can download the product (available for aarch64, ppc64le, s390x and x86_64 architectures) from SUSE's download server (registration required, pkglist).