PC Pro Labs Winner - Office Suites, December 2004
Verdict: "The best all-round office suite is also the cheapest. With excellent Microsoft compatibility, a consistent interface and a good network of ad-hoc support, this is the king of the business tools."Rating:
"We should point out here that PC Pro isn't throwing its weight behind OpenOffice purely by dint of the fact that it's free. We firmly stand by our assertion that it offers a more compelling proposition than Microsoft Office; its cross-platform support and the speed at which it's being developed leads us to believe that, together with StarOffice, it could - nay should - become the dominant force in office suites within the next three to five years.
"If you don't want to be left behind, now could be the time to switch."
"...the best thing about OpenOffice is that you can freely distribute it to your students who can run it on their computers legally."
Visit the OpenOffice website.
Top 100 Award from PC World Magazine
"Since its first release, Ubuntu has been extraordinarily successful. A lot of users began to use it and very few went back to their old distribution. It also participated greatly in attracting new people to GNU/Linux." (LinuxForums.org)
"Ubuntu just works!"
Visit the Ubuntu website.
PC Magazine Technical Excellence Award, January 2006
"Mozilla's Firefox Web browser, the new poster child for the open-source movement, wins our award as the most innovative piece of consumer software. Offering the sort of inventive new tools missing from Microsoft's Internet Explorer in recent years, Firefox did the unthinkable by grabbing almost 10 percent of the browser market in 2005. It popularized tabbed browsing, which lets you easily move from site to site within a single window. It brought RSS to the fore, letting you quickly browse online news feeds. And it introduced smart keywords to stream data instantly to the browser toolbar."
"Firefox is just so fast!"Visit the Firefox website
IT Reviews, March 2006
"here's
the Puppy Linux proposition in a
nutshell: have you got at least a Pentium-class PC with 32MB of RAM
and a CD drive? Then you can have access to an easy-to-use operating
system with office software, e-mail clients, Web
browsers, IM clients, graphics applications, audio/visual players,
photo editors and much more. It's free, it's fast, it'll boot from a CD
without affecting your hard drive and the entire package is a
mere 71MB download. "
PC Magazine Review
"GIMP—its name stands for GNU Image
Manipulation Program—was first
released by two Berkeley students in 1996. Since then, this free
open-source program has matured into a powerful image editor. It's
developed a fairly large user base, and it has been ported to multiple
platforms, including Windows. The latest release, The GIMP 2.0, has a
completely revamped interface ...
"The new UI takes giant strides forward, making GIMP simpler
and more flexible. For example, the old interface made you right-click
on the image window in order to choose almost any function in the
program. Now a menu at the top of the image window (as you get into the
more mainstream programs) offers easy access to GIMP's wide array of
commands.
"We also tested the Windows version and were impressed to see that GIMP installs painlessly on Windows XP and runs just as well as it does on Linux... GIMP 2.0 is a powerful program, and its price certainly can't be beat."
Educause blog
British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) is the principal government agency responsible for IT and ICT in compulsory education in the UK. Every year at the annual British Educational Technology Tradeshow (BETT) they give awards for best practice is a whole range of categories within their remit. This year, three of the sixteen awards went to Moodle users in part for their work with Moodle.
Review - Encryptec Internet Porta
"For those who are familiar with the concept of Citrix or Windows Terminal Server, LTSP is effectively the Linux equivalent. There are a number of components to LTSP that once combined, provide a thin client environment for Linux/X Windows over a local area network. For everyone else, it's a way to convert old / scrap PC's into usable / current graphical Linux workstations."
"I bought 120 computers off Ebay for £1900 and they all worked perfectly as LTSP clients."