Unity heads to businesses with Ubuntu 12.04

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By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 26 Apr 2012 at 12:19

Canonical has released Ubuntu 12.04, the long-term support version of the open source OS.

Nicknamed Precise Panogolin, Ubuntu 12.04 is the latest release in the six-month update cycle, but this version will be supported for five years, to make it easier for businesses and other organisations to use.

Because of that, 12.04 is focused on stability and doesn't include many major changes. Steve George, vice president of communications, said it was "all of the different threads developing over the past few years, brought together in one release".

Aside from updates to bundled applications, 12.04 features the new Head Up Display, which allows users to search for commands rather than relying on drop-down menus.

Precise Pangolin is also the first LTS version to feature the much-debated Unity interface. "We've had 18 months to mature it and stabilise it and build out new features on it," George said.

To make life easier for businesses, Ubuntu now allows virtualised apps running on a remote Windows desktop to be accessed directly via an icon on the desktop, rather than opening up an entirely new remote desktop instance. "It's basically seamless access to those applications," added George.

Server update

The server version of Ubuntu has also been refreshed, but unlike the desktop LTS version, it will receive feature updates over its five-year lifespan to keep it up to date as the cloud evolves.

"With 12.04, you can load Ubuntu as the server operating system on your hardware and deploy and OpenStack cloud, and what we're committing to do is maintain that for the next five years and because this software is developing so rapidly we're also committed to ship new versions of that into 12.04 for the next few cycles," George said.

"You'll have a stable hardware set-up using 12.04, but you'll be able to get the latest and greatest features from the OpenStack world," he said.