Canonical Launches Free Ubuntu Pro Subscriptions for Everyone

Ubuntu Pro

Canonical today launched a free tier of its Ubuntu Pro commercial offering for everyone who wants to extend the coverage of security updates on their Ubuntu PCs to up to 10 years and also access exclusive tools.

Announced by Canonical last year, Ubuntu Pro is an expanded security maintenance and compliance subscription as part of Ubuntu Advantage, which was initially designed for enterprise customers offering global services who wanted long-term stability for their infrastructure and applications.

Now, Canonical decided to expand Ubuntu Pro for personal and small-scale commercial use with a free tier for up to five machines, in an attempt to make open source more easily consumable by the masses and provide Ubuntu users with better security for their installations to up to 10 years.

Ubuntu Pro is available for every supported Ubuntu LTS version, starting with Ubuntu 16.04 ESM and up to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. However, it is not available for interim Ubuntu releases like the upcoming Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu).

“Since we first launched Ubuntu LTS, with five years of free security coverage for the main OS, our enterprise customers have asked us to cover more and more of the wider open-source landscape under private commercial agreements. Today, we are excited to offer the benefits of all of that work, free of charge, to anyone in the world, with a free personal Ubuntu Pro subscription,” said Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth.

With an Ubuntu Pro free subscription on your Ubuntu LTS machine, you will expand the security coverage for critical, high, and medium CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) to thousands of apps and toolchains, including Ansible, Apache Tomcat, Apache Zookeeper, Docker, Drupal, Nagios, Node.js, phpMyAdmin, Puppet, PowerDNS, Python 2, Redis, Rust, WordPress, ROS, and others.

In addition to providing critical security updates, the Ubuntu Pro subscription also gives you access to various tools for compliance management and hardening in regulated and audited environments, as well as to FIPS 140-2 certified cryptographic packages.

Users can obtain a free personal Ubuntu Pro subscription on the official website. Again, please keep in mind that you can use the free subscription for up to five machines. If you need it for more than five PCs, you will have to purchase a paid plan, which is currently priced at $25 USD per year for workstations or $500 USD per year for servers. Official Ubuntu Community members get support for up to 50 machines.

To add your free Ubuntu Pro subscription to your Ubuntu LTS machine, first register on the website linked above by creating or authenticating with a free Ubuntu One account. It takes a single click to register, then you’ll have access to your Ubuntu Pro token.

On your Ubuntu machine, open the Software & Updates utility and go to the Livepatch tab. There, click on the “Attach this machine” button and paste the token in the Ubuntu Advantage dialog. You can also do it manually from the command line by running the command below in the Terminal app (replace TOKEN with your token).

sudo ua attach TOKEN

After that, you should see that your Basic Security Maintenance plan was changed to Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) in the Updates tab of the Software & Updates utility.

Image credits: Canonical (edited by Marius Nestor)

Last updated 1 year ago

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