Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

The winners of the fourth annual SourceForge Community Choice Awards were announced at this years OSCON. Over 47,000 open source projects were nominated for this years Community Choice Awards and 85 finalists were selected across twelve categories.

This years winner for the Best Project for Government was OpenOffice.org for its popular fully-featured office suite and Firebird, a relational database management system (RDBMS), won the prize for Best Project for the Enterprise. The Notepad++ source code editor won the Best Tool or Utility for Developers and phpMyAdmin, a MySQL administration tool, was chosen as the Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins.

The social brainstorming and mind mapping application XMind was selected as the Best Project for Academia and ScummVM (Script creation utility for maniac mansion Virtual Machine) was voted as the Best Project for Gamers. The Best New Project went to eeebuntu, a customised variant of Ubuntu for ASUS Eee PC netbooks and this years Best Project for Multimedia was the popular open source audio editor and recorder Audacity.

This years most popular project, winning four out of the twelve categories, was PortableApps.com, which allows users easily install various popular open source applications to a USB flash drive or external hard drive. Once installed, the applications can run completely from the drive and be used on any Windows computer. PortableApps.com, founded by John T. Haller, was selected as this years Best Commercial Open Source Project, Best Visual Design, Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything and Best Project.

SourceForge.net is the largest online open source hosting site and hosts over 230,000 projects.