Dell on Friday launched two notebooks and a desktop with Hardy Heron, the version of Ubuntu Linux that was released in April.

Dell is offering Ubuntu 8.04 on the consumer systems in the United States, France, Germany, Spain, Canada, United Kingdom, Mexico and Colombia. The open source operating system is available on the XPS M1330N and the Inspiron 1525N notebooks and the Inspiron 530N desktop.

In early August, Dell plans to add the XPS M1530N and the Studio 15N notebooks to the line-up. The releases will be in time for LinuxWorld, which runs Aug. 4-7 in San Francisco. At the conference, Dell plans to discuss where it sees the direction of Linux going in 2009.

Dell has made the latest Linux image more accessible to a global audience by including the ability to select a language during the first boot process. "While this doesn't mean we're shipping in every country -- yet -- it's a step in the right direction," Daniel Judd, Dell's product group strategist, said in the company's blog.

Best Buy and Amazon.com are offering Hardy Heron on CD for $20 and $18, respectively. Ubuntu for three years has gotten the highest distribution numbers on DistroWatch.com. The OS has gotten favorable reviews, but reviewers have also warned that it is not a good choice for nontechnical users.

Ubuntu is produced by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth's firm, Canonical, based in London. Ubuntu came out of the work of the Shuttleworth Foundation based in Durbanville, South Africa. It is a Linux that is updated frequently, with the next release due in October.