Canonical Announces General Availability of Ubuntu Pro, Free for Up to 5 PCs

The subscription is free for up to 5 machines for everyone or up to 50 machines for official Ubuntu community members.
Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
Ubuntu Pro

Ubuntu maker Canonical announced today the general availability of its Ubuntu Pro comprehensive subscription for Ubuntu users who want to expand the security updates and compliance of their systems.

First released in a beta version in October 2022 with free subscriptions for personal and small-scale commercial use on up to 5 machines, Ubuntu Pro is only available for Ubuntu LTS (Long-Term Support) releases, starting with Ubuntu 16.04, and promises up to 10 years of security updates, as well as access to exclusive tools.

These include Ansible, Apache Tomcat, Apache Zookeeper, Docker, Drupal, Nagios, Node.js, phpMyAdmin, Puppet, PowerDNS, Python 2, Redis, Rust, WordPress, ROS, and many others.

The Ubuntu Pro subscription promises patches for critical CVEs in less than 24 hours and expands the optional technical support to an additional 23,000 open-source packages and toolchains beyond the main operating system, not just for Ubuntu’s main software repository.

“The beta release was welcomed by the likes of NVIDIA, Google, Acquia, VMWare, and LaunchDarkly. Since the beta announcement in October 2022, tens of thousands of Ubuntu users have signed up for the service,” said Canonical in a press release.

Ubuntu Pro also gives you access to FIPS 140-2 certified cryptographic packages, tools for compliance management in regulated and audited environments, Livepatch support for rebootless kernel updates, as well as system management and automated patching at scale with Landscape.

Canonical says that if you need Ubuntu Pro 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 with a 30-day free trial. Official Ubuntu Community members get free support for up to 50 machines.

To add the Ubuntu Pro subscription to your Ubuntu LTS machine, you will need a free Ubuntu One account, where you’ll have access to your Ubuntu Pro token. This can be enabled on your systems through the Software & Updates utility, in the Livepatch tab, or manually via the command line by running the following command (where TOKEN must be replaced with your Ubuntu Pro token).

sudo ua attach TOKEN

To see if your Ubuntu Pro subscription was activated, go to the Updates tab of the Software & Updates utility and look if the Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) plan is active under “For other packages, this system has.”

For those running Ubuntu in the cloud, Ubuntu Pro is also available through the marketplaces of Canonical’s public cloud partners, such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), Azure, and Google Cloud.

Last updated 1 year ago

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