News briefs for June 22, 2018.

Canonical yesterday announced[1] that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is certified on select Intel NUC Mini PCs and boards for IoT development. According to the Ubuntu blog post, this pairing "provides benefits to device manufacturers at every stage of their development journey and accelerates time to market." You can download the certified image from here[2].

In other Canonical news, yesterday the company released a microcode firmware update for Ubuntu users with AMD processors to address the Spectre vulnerability, Softpedia reports[3]. The updated amd64-microcode packages for AMD CPUs are available for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), "all AMD users are urged to update their systems."

The Document Foundation announces[4] the release of LibreOffice 6.0.5 this morning. This release "still represents the bleeding edge in terms of features—and as such is targeted at early adopters, tech-savvy and power users—but is also ready for mainstream users and enterprise deployments." You can download LibreOffice here[5].

Git 2.18 was released yesterday, Phoronix reports[6]. Besides several other improvements and bug fixes, the most significant new feature is the introduction of the wire protocol (protocol_v2), which is "designed to be much faster and is already being used at Google and elsewhere due to the significant performance benefits". See the release announcement[7] for all the details.

Google's Measure recently received a much needed update, and the app is now available for all ARCore-compatible phones running Android 7.0 and up. According to the Engadget post[8], "Measure enables you to estimate the length, width and areas of items in the natural word (by dragging specially designed tools) and save images of them for future reference."

Jill

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