Canonical Releases Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for Enterprises

Business-friendly Linux flavor will come with five years of updates and optional commercial support.

Canonical has released Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the fourth long-term support version of the Linux distribution that aims to attract enterprise users. Canonical guarantees five years of updates and optional commercial support.

“For large enterprise deployments with long-term planning processes, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is our best desktop yet,” said Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical, in a prepared statement. “Thanks to our expanded hardware partnerships, we’ll make regular updates to support new PCs from certified partners like Dell, HP and Lenovo. And we’ll support even more companies that make the switch to Ubuntu on their desktops.”

Canonical claims that an upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is "by far more cost-effective" than "expensive upgrades to Windows 7".

The latest LTS release includes for desktop virtualization from Citrix, VMware, and Microsoft RDP 7.1, which gives businesses three different ways to deliver office and other productivity software to client PCs. The open source LibreOffice suite is offered as a standard component of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS package. As the regular desktop version, this new LTS release also includes Ubuntu's Unity user interface

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS can be downloaded from Canonical's Web site.