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Out of the box Ubuntu 24.04 LTS does not show video thumbnail previews. Instead you are greeted with a video file icon. I personally prefer seeing some sort of preview as it helps quickly identify some of my gaming video clips that are titled only with the date and time (using OBS to record game play). A quick way to accomplish this is to install ffmpegthumbnailer. sudo apt install ffmpegthumbnailer As you can see, the result is video thumbnail previews are visible and it makes Ubuntu a better user experience. It should be part of the Ubuntu restricted package in my view but it isn't :D

I am currently using Ubuntu 23.10 with OBS Studio installed from the OBS Studio launch pad PPA and have an Intel Arc A770 LE 16GB graphics card. After installing OBS I was unable to use any Quick Sync encoding, the moment I click on record I would get an error that the output failed. Checking the OBS logs revealed the following: 11:20:18.315: [qsv encoder: 'advanced_video_recording'] debug info: 11:20:18.317: Failed to initialize MFX 11:20:18.317: [qsv encoder: 'msdk_impl'] Specified object/item/sync point not found. (MFX_ERR_NOT_FOUND) 11:20:18.317: [qsv encoder: 'advanced_video_recording'] qsv failed to load After a bit of online research things were pointing towards missing software packages required  for Quick Sync, specifically oneVPL. After playing around all you need to do is to install two additional software packages, these being openvpl-tools and libmfx-gen1.2. Easily achievable by issuing the following commands in a terminal: sudo apt install onevpl-t...

By default Dolphin File Manager is set to open the last viewed location, and I find that quite annoying because if the last location was a USB drive that is no longer mounted, when you open Dolphin it will try and load that last location but it will display an error as it is no longer mounted. Additionally if the last location was a folder you accessed that required sudo, it will also display an error. You can easily change the behaviour of Dolphin File Manager so that it will always open to a location of your choice, for example your home directory, which makes the most sense to me. Personally I think KDE should default to opening your /home directory and not the last location you accessed.  Or is it just me?

I've been using Ubuntu 23.10 as my main OS for a few months now and its been really great, doing everything I need. My needs are not much, I use my PC to browse the internet, record game play from my PlayStation 5, simple edits to videos and that's about it. Well... I've started playing a few games again in Steam through Proton and it is impressive to see older games like APB Reloaded and Warframe run better in Ubuntu than Windows 11 on my Intel Arc A770 graphics card. Ubuntu 23.10 with custom icons and background July 2024 marks the end of Ubuntu 23.10 but April 2024 will see the release of Ubuntu 24:04 LTS which I am looking forward to, and it will be my main OS going forward. I think right now in 2024 Linux based operating systems are a very viable alternative to Windows but holding it back is a lack of awareness about open source software, and some areas where mainstream hardware support is lagging behind, wireless networking is a good example. There is...

This is a little tip on how to boost gaming performance in Linux when gaming on an Intel Arc graphics device. By default your Intel Arc device will be scaling its GPU clock frequency, my Arc A770 scales its frequency between 300MHz and 2400MHz. This can be a performance issue especially when playing games and if we fix the frequency so it does not scale we can achieve more consistent FPS or in some cases better FPS. It will be the older less GPU intensive games that see the most benefit. To quickly illustrate this, I am going to run glxgears with vsync disabled in a terminal vblank_mode=0 glxgears 21805 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4360.969 FPS 21947 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4389.193 FPS 21930 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4385.876 FPS 21966 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4392.969 FPS 21934 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4386.701 FPS This is with GPU frequency scaling. The next set of results have frequency scaling disabled, GPU frequency is fixed to 2400MHz. 52209 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10441.599 FPS 53527 fr...

This guide will show you how to recompile and customize your current Ubuntu 23.10 kernel. Reasons you may wish to do this include learning, changing kernel settings or just for fun. There are a number of different ways to do this, I like simple and easy to manage (see Debian kernel handbook chapter 4 ) and in this guide we will download the Ubuntu linux-source using apt install and compile the kernel as a *.deb package. At the time of writing in Ubuntu 23.10, the current linux-source is 6.5.0. Updates may change that, therefore take this into account when reading this guide. Also as a side note, this guide assumes secure boot is disabled. Before you begin I strongly recommend changing the default grub boot behavior so that you have a grub menu on boot and can select your kernel. By default the grub boot menu is hidden. This will make it easy to boot into a working kernel should your custom kernel result in a system that fails to boot. Using a text editor edit the defa...

A very interesting development if it does happen, I first became aware of this from a site called Phoronix and as pointed out over there more details can be found at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/2051342 Ubuntu and many other Linux distributions come with a very generic kernel, not optimised for anything in particular but one key area this impacts quite negatively is gaming and multimedia.  Gaming on Linux has increased phenomenally since the release of Valve's steam deck powered by their custom Arch Linux distribution and their efforts with Steam and Proton, and with interest in gaming on Linux being at an all time high more and more people are trying it out only to be let down by their Linux distribution being poorly optimised out of the box for gaming. The Linux kernel being a major contributing factor, so much so that we now have gaming orientated distributions such as Nobara that have kernels tuned for low latency and various other tweaks to improve gam...

This is a quick guide on how to setup IPFire so that multiple PlayStation 5 consoles can play Call of Duty at the same time with an open NAT connection. Call of Duty on the PlayStation 5 uses UDP port 3074. To get an open NAT connection all you have to do is port forward UDP port 3074 to your PlayStation 5's local IP. However, when you have two (or more) PlayStation 5's and you and someone else wish to play COD together at the same time, you cannot port forward UDP port 3074 to both consoles ( You can create the rule but it wont work ) and play simultaneously with an open NAT. One will work and one won't, or there will be connectivity issues resulting in both unable to play. This is normal port forwarding behavior. If you think about what port forwarding does you will understand why. It is a rule that tells your router to send all incoming external traffic inbound for UDP port 3074 to a single local IP. Incoming external traffic: UDP 3074---> send to ---> 10.0.0.2 Now...

I've been using pfsense for a few years and it has been a good replacement over a traditional router but I've been dissatisfied with its online gaming performance. If I plug my modem directly to my PlayStation 5 and play COD MW2, things are good. If I then use pfsense, even if it is configured to allow an open NAT the gaming experience is like there is some form of delay despite having the same ping. I would describe this as other players seem to be reacting well in advanced and I appear to be out of sync. This is more evident when I watch myself dying in the kill cam and see what the other play saw me do. Either pfsense is bad, I've configured it poorly, it's a hardware issue or a combination of these things.  In any event I decided to give IPFire a go and my COD MW2 experience is like I have my modem plugged directly into my PlayStation 5. Even my PC online browsing is more responsive and things are loading quicker! I therefore recommend using IPFire over pfsense -  h...

First step is to install needed packages, open a terminal and type the following, sudo apt install build-essential libncurses-dev flex bison debhelper libssl-dev libelf-dev Now download your kernel source from kernel.org, you can do this using the terminal if you wish, for example; wget https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/t/linux-6.6-rc5.tar.gz This command will download the kernel to your current directory Extract the kernel archive. tar -xf linux-6.6-rc5.tar.gz Go into the directory  cd linux-6.6-rc5 Customise your kernel make menuconfig Once you have finished save and exit.        Now it is time to build the kernel package. time make -j $(($(nproc)+1)) bindeb-pkg Depending on your processor this may take some time. When it has finished your kernel *.deb package will be in your home directory. To install it, sudo dpkg -i linux-image-6.6.0-rc5_6.6.0-rc5-4_amd64.deb sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-6.6.0-rc5_6.6.0-rc5-4_amd64.deb Then reboot and enjoy your newer...

I currently have an Intel Arc A770 LE 16GB and out of the box Fedora 37 does not support it. There are some workarounds but the best option (at the time of writing) is to use kernel 6.2.7 as that has native Intel Arc support. This is a quick guide I made for myself, it will build a linux-6.2.7 *.rpm package in Fedora 37. As with anything in Linux, there is usually more than one way to do things or a better way to do something. If you have a suggestion leave a comment below. Open a terminal  sudo dnf install ncurses-devel flex bison rpm-build elfutils-libelf-devel rpmdevtools openssl-devel dwarves perl This should install required packages to build and compile the kernel. rpmdev-setuptree This will setup your home directory for building the *.rpm package. cd ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/ We are going to go into the SOURCES directory in our rpmbuild tree. wget https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.2.7.tar.xz This will download linux-6.2.7.tar.xz into the SOURCES directory. tar...

Available at: https://repo.radeon.com/amdgpu-install/latest/ubuntu/

If you notice the sound quality when playing a youtube video sounds off and not as good as Windows, I recommend you modify some PulseAudio settings by editing a configuration file with a text editor of your choice, sudo powers required. The file in question is is /etc/pulse/daemon.conf Look for the setting below, ; resample-method = speex-float-1 Uncomment the line by deleting the ; and change the default value from speex-float-1 to sox-vhq. resample-method = soxr-vhq I would also recommend the following, default-sample-rate = 48000 alternate-sample-rate = 48000 Explaining it in more detail No doubt you have seen this recommendation all over the internet. By default Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will set your sound device to run with a sample rate of 48KHz. This is where the setting 'default-sample-rate = 48000' comes in. When you watch a video on youtube through your browser, the audio sample rate from youtube is 44.1KHz (because that is what youtube encodes audio at). Ideally the 'alt...

Ubuntu is the most popular Linux based operating system, an alternative to Windows and Mac OS. If you are not into gaming or do not have a need for Windows then maybe Ubuntu could work for you? It is completely free and can even run from a USB stick. You can download Ubuntu from https://www.ubuntu.com/ Some popular programs include Libre Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, Kdenlive, Chrome, Steam. Personally I prefer using Ubuntu over Windows, in Ubuntu I don't hear my hard disk drive thrashing like in Windows 10 and browsing my files seem quicker. On a plus side I don't have to worry about viruses either. Maybe it will work well for you?

A few years ago when I first heard about Steam OS I was intrigued, did this mean gaming on Linux would be on par with Windows? Would Steam OS be the ultimate operating system for gamers? Fast forward to today and Steam OS has been around for over three years, and what's interesting about that is the web does not seem to be talking about it. So it's time to find out why. http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/ After following the Steam OS  instructions from their site, I created my Steam OS USB installation media and rebooted my PC. Upon boot there was the option of an automatic install and expert install. I went for the automatic install although there were problems formatting my hard drive. It didn't work, so I rebooted and chose expert mode. Despite the name expert mode, all I did was click next until I came to the formatting hard drive screen. My hard drive had Ubuntu 16.04 LTS installed and this was causing a conflict with the automatic...