Category: GNOME

How To: Disable Intel Turbo Boost on Linux using systemd + intel_pstate
My laptop has issues with coil whine, resulting in me needing to disable Intel Turbo Boost. I usually use a GNOME Extension like CPU Power Manager but at the time of writing that extension isn’t compatible with GNOME 40, and isn’t much use for non-GNOME users.

Firstly elevate to sudo with sudo -i, then:
```
nano /etc/systemd/system/disable-intel-turboboost.service
```
Paste in the following:
```
[Unit]
Description=Disable Intel Turbo Boost using pstate driver 
[Service]
ExecStart=/bin/sh -c "/usr/bin/echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo"
ExecStop=/bin/sh -c "/usr/bin/echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo"
RemainAfterExit=yes
[Install]
WantedBy=sysinit.target
```
Next reload the systemd management configuration, enable and then start the new service, then lastly check the service is running. Enabling the service will start it automatically on a reboot, thus keeping Turbo Boost switched off all the time. If you only want to use it occasionally, skip the enable step and just start/stop the service as/when needed.
```
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable disable-intel-turboboost
systemctl start disable-intel-turboboost
systemctl status disable-intel-turboboost
```
The last command should give you:
```
[root@amethyst ~]# systemctl status disable-intel-turboboost
● disable-intel-turboboost.service - Disable Intel Turbo Boost using pstate driver
Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/disable-intel-turboboost.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: active (exited) since Tue 2021-05-04 20:58:57 BST; 10s ago
Process: 22392 ExecStart=/bin/sh -c /usr/bin/echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo (code=exited, status>
Main PID: 22392 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
CPU: 7ms

May 04 20:58:57 amethyst systemd[1]: Started Disable Intel Turbo Boost using pstate driver.
```
On my laptop it was immediately obvious Turbo Boost was turned off because the coil whine stopped instantly, but to check your current clock speed you can run:
```
lscpu | grep "CPU MHz"
CPU MHz: 1800.019
```
To re-enable Turbo Boost permanently:
```
sudo systemctl disable disable-intel-turboboost
```
To re-enable Turbo Boost when needed (start service to disable Turbo Boostagain):
```
sudo systemctl stop disable-intel-turboboost
```
May 5, 2021
Top 5 GNOME Themes: November 2020

This month we’ve picked some of the best looking GNOME/GTK3 themes available from Pling. Almost every theme we’ve picked has dark/light variants and some have coloured variants too. We’ve used the Papirus icon pack available here.

Venta X Dark

Screenshot:

Download URL: https://www.pling.com/p/1396612

Ant

Screenshot:

Download URL: https://www.pling.com/p/1099856/

Orchis

Screenshot:

Download URL: https://www.pling.com/p/1357889/

Materials Original

Screenshot:

Download URL: https://www.pling.com/p/1427006/

Sweet

Screenshot:

Download URL: https://www.pling.com/p/1253385/

November 2, 2020
Fedora 33 Out Today! What’s New?

As many are likely already aware, Fedora is RedHat’s free (in both senses) Linux distribution. It shuns proprietary software and code and instead only includes FOSS at every level from kernel to userland. Fedora 33 launched today, so let’s have a look and see what’s changed.

Fedora 33 Desktop with Firefox, Files, and Software open

UI Updates:

GNOME:

Fedora 33 ships with GNOME 3.38, bringing you the latest GNOME features such as icon rearranging on the All Apps view, a new welcome tour, parental controls in Settings, better multi-monitor support for monitors with varying refresh rates, and re-designed Screenshot and Sound Recorder utilities. You can learn more about GNOME 3.38 from the GNOME website here.

New GNOME Sound Recorder UI

New GNOME Sound Recorder

New UI of Screenshots in GNOME

Wallpapers:

Fedora 33’s default wallpaper is now animated (time-of-day slideshow with hue changes) – animated wallpapers have been available since Fedora 7, but users had to explicitly change their wallpaper to an animated one.

Under-the-hood Changes:

nano:

nano is now the default editor for CLI users, replacing the more difficult to use VIM editor. Personally, nano is my preferred editor after FreeBSD’s EE (EasyEditor) so this is a welcome change to myself and many others.

Nano in Terminal on Fedora 33

BTRFS:

Fedora 33 changes the default filesystem on a fresh install from ext4 to BTRFS. Users can still opt to use ext4 (and indeed would continue to do so if they upgrade to Fedora 33 without a fresh install), but the default filesystem has now changed. BTRFS brings additional functionality over ext4 such as pooling (allowing users to spread their filesystem across multiple drives), snapshots, and checksums.

To quote Matthew Miller from the Fedora Project directly:

This is a big shift: we’ve been using ext filesystems since Fedora Core 1. BTRFS offers some really compelling features for users, including transparent compression and copy-on-write. Matthew Miller

Fedora 33 drops official support for mod_php. The project argues that many in the web hosting industry use more modern (and thread supporting) variants of PHP such as php-fpm.

Support for NTS:

Support for the NTS (Network Time Security)) authentication mechanism in the NTP client/server (chrony) and installer (anaconda), allowing users to securely synchronise the system clock to local or public NTP servers.

Changes to Python:

Support for python26 and python34 (versions 2.6 and 3.4 respectively) has been dropped – both have reached End of Life (EoL) and the project explains they were “kept around only to test software targeting EPEL6”.

What’s Missing?

Most of what Fedora 33 is missing is really down to software licencing. Since Fedora is a distro that only uses free software, things like Nvidia drivers and some packages are not available by default, but are still available.

Snap

Fedora 33 continues to be missing support for Canonical’s Snap (but it can be easily installed using the guide below).

Fedora How To: Install Snap on Fedora

It does, however, still have support for Flatpak (support for which was first added in Fedora 23). Snap would be a fantastic addition to Fedora though, but due to the Snap Store including non-free software it’s understandable why it’s not included by default.

Stellarium in GNOME Software showing that it is available from Flatpak or RPM

October 27, 2020
5 Things to do after installing Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla
Canonical has released Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla, while not much has changed over 20.04 it does bring us a handful of new things (namely GNOME 3.38.0, ZFS is no longer classified as experimental, and the Linux Kernel 5.8).

1. Install a new theme and icons

20.10 might have only just been released, but Ubuntu’s UI (especially the icon pack) is getting a bit dated these days Luckily it’s easy to install new icons and themes – follow our guides on installing GNOME Tweaks first, and then download and install ocs-url from here (this is needed for downloading themes from pling.com).

Our favourite theme at the moment is Orchis, available here https://www.pling.com/p/1357889/, and our favourite icon pack is Papirus https://www.pling.com/p/1166289.

2. Install a new browser (if you don’t use Firefox)

Our favourite browser was only released on Linux 3 days ago and it’s still in Dev Preview, but Microsoft Edge is a great choice. It’s Chromium based, runs Chrome extensions, but all of the innards that phone home to Google have been removed. Download it from here: https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-gb/download/?platform=linux. Other options include Chromium, Chrome, Opera, or GNOME Web.

3. Backups and anti-virus.

Ubuntu comes with a backup utility called Déjà Dup Backups, and ClamAV is a FOSS option for your antivirus needs. We have a guide on ClamAV here.

4. Get some Applications

Most Linux distros come with LibreOffice + Firefox out of the box and that’s about it. Here are some things you might want to install.
- Google Chrome (download from https://www.google.com/chrome/ and run the .deb installer)
- VLC – a fantastic video player (get it from your distro’s software installer)
- FreeOffice – a great free-of-charge (but not FOSS) office suite with full Microsoft Office file compatibility (https://www.freeoffice.com/en/). It has a ribbon UI that looks similar to Microsoft Office too.
- Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/about/)
5. Get a ~~dog~~ Dock

GNOME comes with a side-mounted bar, but the GNOME extension Dash to Dock gives you a traditional dock that can live on any edge and has a tonne of options. Dash to dock is available from the GNOME Extensions website here: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/307/dash-to-dock/. Check out the guides at the bottom of this post for steps on installing GNOME Extensions + GNOME Tweaks if you’re unsure.
October 24, 2020
Install a network printer and scanner on Linux
Linux support for printers straight after an install is excellent, even on a FOSS-only distro like Fedora. To add your network connected printer, I’d recommend finding instructions from the printer manufacturer but failing that (or if you don’t want to download their driver package), you can probably get it working without downloading a single driver.

Printer function:

Head to Settings > Printers and click Add…

Empty Printer pane in Settings

Type in the IP address of the printer, and then click on one of the options in the list, and click Add (mine gave three options – I picked C1860, but LPD and JetDirect work fine too, you just need to pick the printer model from a list with either of those).

Adding a printer in Settings

To do a test print, click the cog icon next to the printer and then Test Page.
Cogs

Test Print
Scanner function:

Adding the scanner is quite simple too. You’ll need to open up a Terminal window and open up the /etc/sane.d/xerox_mfp.conf file.
```
sudo nano /etc/sane.d/xerox_mfp.conf
```
Find the line in the file for your printer (Hint: CTRL + W brings up search in Nano – type the query and then press enter).

Searching for 1860 in Nano

Once you’ve found your printer in the list, comment out the usb 0x4e8 xxxxx line by putting a hash character in front (#), and then make a new line and type tcp <ip address> (with the IP address of your printer, of course) and exit + save changes (Hint: in Nano press CTRL + X, then type y, and press the Enter key).
```
#Samsung C1860FW
#usb 0x04e8 0x346b
tcp 172.16.0.101
```
USB line commented out with tcp 172.16.0.101

Finally, open up GNOME Scanner (or any scanning software using the SANE protocol) and scan away.
Search for Document Scanner

Click Scan

Click Scan in the top left

See your scan

Look ma, it scanned!
October 21, 2020
UI of the Month – August 2020

As part of a new blogpost series, we’re going to be picking a monthly winner for our UI of the Month contest. Every Reddit thread we come across recommends the same things, and it’s not much better on theme marketplaces either so we’ve decided to share a new theme + icon pack every month.

Icon Pack: Luna (by darkomarko42)

This month’s Icon Pack pick is Luna Icons. With colourful icons based on Marwaita and Papirus iconpacks (both fantastic choices in themselves), Luna manages to combine the best of two well designed icon packs giving a fresh look to any stock-icon’d desktop.

Source: https://www.pling.com/s/Gnome/p/1405455

Theme: Kimi (by Eliver Lara)

Kimi brings with it a comforting purple coloured UI that reminds me of those purple translucent 1990s electronics, which while most likely not the designer’s intent I still enjoy.

Source: https://www.pling.com/s/Gnome/p/1326889

July 29, 2020
Top 5 GNOME GTK Themes for July 2020

One of the best things about using a popular desktop environment like GNOME is that there are thousands of different themes available, each of them doing things in their own unique way. Here is a list of our top 5 this month, most of them have different colour options so you can pick lighter/darker modes and you can use any compatible icon pack!

5 – Kimi + Dash to Dock + Papirus (icons)

App – Dash to Dock: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/307/dash-to-dock/
Theme – Kimi: https://www.pling.com/s/Gnome/p/1326889/
Icons – Papirus: https://github.com/PapirusDevelopmentTeam/papirus-icon-theme

4 – Ant+ Dash to Dock + Inverse (icons)

App – Dash to Dock: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/307/dash-to-dock/
Theme – Ant (ant-alt-style): https://www.pling.com/s/Gnome/p/1099856/
Icons – Inverse: https://www.pling.com/p/1344791

3 – BaZik+ Dash to Dock + Inverse (icons)

App – Dash to Dock: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/307/dash-to-dock/
Theme – BaZik (Bazik_Light_Magenta): https://www.pling.com/s/Gnome/p/1304241/
Icons – Breeze: https://www.pling.com/s/Gnome/p/1390301

2 – Layan Light + Dash to Dock + Tela (icons)

App – Dash to Dock: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/307/dash-to-dock/
Theme – Layan Light: https://www.pling.com/p/1309214/
Icons – Tela: https://www.pling.com/p/1279924/

1 – Orchis + Dash to Dock

App – Dash to Dock: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/307/dash-to-dock/
Theme – Orchis: https://www.pling.com/p/1309214/
Icons – Yaru (default Ubuntu)

July 3, 2020