Ubuntu receives Editor’s Choice Award from PC Welt

Canonical Ltd, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, today announced it has scooped another award for Ubuntu, its leading-edge Linux distribution. At the PC Welt awards dinner held during the CeBIT Exhibition in Hanover, on Friday 16^th March, Ubuntu was awarded the “Editor's Choice Award for Open Source”.

PC-WELT editor in chief, Andreas Perband, comments, “The 5^th PC Welt awards continued the tradition of recognising outstanding and innovative IT-products, and companies, with a high potential for the future. Within the Open Source category there was one clear winner, Ubuntu. I congratulate them on getting this well deserved award. We chose Ubuntu because of its dedication to releasing every six months – bringing the best of Open Source to its users, its ease of installation and its 'just works' philosophy.”

Jane Silber, Canonical spokesperson said, “We are extremely proud to receive this accolade. Everyone who has contributed to Ubuntu deserves this. This year will see Canonical and the Ubuntu community continue to deliver a world-class operating system that offers our users the latest and greatest software that the Open Source world has to offer, whilst meeting the immediate needs of the marketplace.”

With the next release, Ubuntu 7.04, available on 19^th April, desktop users will benefit from a host of new features and benefits including plug-and-play network sharing which allows users to automatically discover and join a wireless network and share files, and a new Windows migration tool which recognises and imports to Ubuntu user's Internet Explorer bookmarks, Firefox favourites, desktop wallpaper, and instant messaging contacts, enabling an easier and faster transition to Ubuntu for new users.

A new Ubuntu Server edition will be released at the same time. It will provide, among other improvements, full hardware-accelerated virtualisation, taking advantage of the virtualisation capabilities of recent Intel and AMD processors.

Ubuntu is open source software, costs nothing to download, and users are free to customise or alter their software in order to meet their needs. The Desktop Edition can be deployed as a general-purpose workstation, thin client, or engineering workstation. The Server Edition provides a well integrated platform and simplifies the deployment process of new servers with any of the standard Internet services such as e-mail, web, file serving and database management.

For deployments which require additional service guarantees, full telephone and online support on commercial terms is available globally from the Global Support Services team at Canonical Ltd and its service partners.

About Canonical and Ubuntu

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, is a global organisation headquartered in Europe committed to the development, distribution and support of open source software products and communities. World-class 24×7 commercial support for Ubuntu is available through Canonical's global support team and partners. Since its launch in October 2004 Ubuntu has become one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions with millions of users around the world. Ubuntu will always be free to download, free to use and free to distribute to others. With these goals in mind, Ubuntu aims to be the most widely used Linux system, and is the centre of a global open source software ecosystem.

Download Ubuntu from www.ubuntu.com/download.

To learn about commercial support for Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu, please see www.canonical.com/support.

For more information visit www.canonical.com or www.ubuntu.com.

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu and their associated logos are all registered trademarks of Canonical Ltd.