Welcome to the Wirral Linux Users Group to learn about and promote Free Open Source Software (FOSS), Linux and the community. Education and schools may find the applications of Free Software particularly useful.
Mozilla Firefox is a web browser (like Internet Explorer) and one of the most popular free open source software with over 8 million unique downloads for version 3.
OpenOffice.org (OO.o or OOo) is a free cross-platform office application suite available for a number of different computer operating systems. It supports the ISO standard OpenDocument Format (ODF) for data interchange as its default file format, as well as Microsoft Office '97–2003 formats, Microsoft Office 2007 format (ability to “open” documents in version 3), among others. The OpenOffice.org web site reports more than 98 million downloads.
Linux is a free open source operating system (like Microsoft Windows) for computers. The operating system of a computer is a collection of the basic instructions that tell the electronic parts of the computer what to do and how to work. There are hundreds of Linux distributions. Many lack funding, lose interest, last a short time, lack support or are unstable (some even cost money). But five Linux distributions stand out for longevity, stability, support, regularly updated, popularity and freedom. A further few have a lot of support in the Linux community. MEPIS, Knoppix, PCLinuxOS and Puppy.
Ubuntu has been released every 6 months since 2004 and are funded by Canonical. Its estimated to have 8 million users.
Fedora has existed since 2003 and are funded by Red Hat.
Debian was first released in 1996.
OpenSUSE has existed since 2004 and is funded by Novell.
Mandriva began as Mandrake in 1998. It currently has about 130 employees (80 of whom are engineers) and has offices in France, the USA, and Brazil.