(Jack Wallen, TechRepublic) At the end of this month (October 29th, 2009 to be exact), Ubuntu will be releasing its newest take on the Linux operating system. This time around, it should be obvious (even to the biggest of skeptics) that Ubuntu is making some serious inroads to the business and enterprise scene.

Prior to this release, I would have said Ubuntu is the best-of-the-best Linux candidate to take over the desktop scene. It’s user friendly, easy to install, stable, secure, and (minus games) everything you would need for desktop computing. Now, however, the ante has been upped. With 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Ubuntu could well be on their way to becoming the best-of-the-best for the business desktop.

“Pshaw!” you say, old naysayer that you are. Well, before you pishposh this off to /dev/null/ you might want to take a look at a few of the new features (and improvements to old features) Ubuntu is bringing to life. Many of these new features should make it readily apparent that Canonical is planning some stealthy attack on the enterprise-level desktop. Let’s take a look at these features.

Bootup: Ubuntu has already made serious headway in the boot up process. When 9.04 was released the goal was the ever-elusive 10 second boot up time. With Ubuntu 9.10 they are inching very close to that time. The alpha release I tested had yet to reach that magic number but it’s getting close, clocking in under 20 seconds (and I was testing in a virtual environment so the installment wasn’t getting 100% of the machine resources).

Software Center: This is really one of the biggest enterprise-level additions. Gone will be the Add/Remove Software tool and (eventually) Synaptic in favor of the Software Center. Although this tool will be used in the same way as the Add/Remove Software tool, it will have one thing its predecessor didn’t have - Commercial Software. That’s right. Now the enterprise (or SMB) user can go to the Software Center and shop for just about any type of software you can imagine - including non-free, enterprise-grade software! All in one very user-friendly tool.