Late last week, however, the free and open source made its debut in beta form on the way to its final release, which is expected in October.

So what's new in this first beta release? Quite a bit, actually. Here's a quick rundown of some of the highlights.

1. Full-Disk Encryption

One of the most exciting changes evident in this new release from a business perspective, in particular, is that Ubuntu 12.10 now natively supports both the logical volume manager (LVM) and full disk encryption. For enterprise and government users with set security requirements to meet, this could be a very big deal.

2. A Single, Consolidated Image