News briefs for April 18, 2019.

Canonical this morning announced the release of Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo". According to the press release, Ubuntu 19.04 is "on open infrastructure deployments, the developer desktop, IoT, and cloud to edge software distribution". Of the release, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth says, "The open-source-first on Ubuntu movement in telco, finance, and media has spread to other sectors. From the public cloud to the private data center to the edge appliance or cluster, open source has become the reference for efficiency and innovation. Ubuntu 19.04 includes the leading projects to underpin that transition, and the developer tooling to accelerate the applications for those domains". You can download Ubuntu 19.04 from here.

The Eclipse Foundation yesterday released its 2019 IoT Developer Survey. More than 1,700 developers participated in the survey about their IoT efforts. Some results: "IoT Cloud Platforms (34%), Home Automation (27%), and Industrial Automation / IIoT (26%) were the respondents' three most common industry focus areas", and "The top three CPU architectures for constrained devices used by respondents were ARM-based, with significant use of niche 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit MCUs." You can read the full survey results here.

OpenSSH 8.0 was released yesterday. You can get it from the mirrors here. The release has several new features and fixes a weakness with scp: "when copying files from a remote system to a local directory, scp(1) did not verify that the filenames that the server sent matched those requested by the client. This could allow a hostile server to create or clobber unexpected local files with attacker-controlled content. This release adds client-side checking that the filenames sent from the server match the command-line request."

digiKam 6.1.0 was released this week with several new features and fixes. It includes a new plugins interface called "DPlugins", and two new plugins: a plugin to copy items to local storage and a plugin to set an image as Linux desktop wallpaper. Go here for download links.

Three new openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released recently with updated packages for Curl, Salt, FFmpeg and more. The 20190412 snapshot updated Ceph and added fixes for Azure. In addition, the 20190415 snapshot included Mozilla Firefox version 66.0.3, and the 20190411 snapshot brought the 5.0.7 Linux kernel.