As of January 2004 SWD Tech offers Linux distribution services for Debian GNU / Linux and intend on offering Fedora & Gentoo Linux distributions, as well as OpenOffice in the very near future. These distribution sets are made up of the official release ISO's made available by each group.
Why Buy Linux?
Well, first off, the man in the street knows that Linux is
supposed to be free, isn't it? True - SWD Tech does not sell Linux (at this
time, we may decide
to distribute
Red Hat Enterprise, Madrake
or another commercial distribution at a later stage), we charge distribution
fees.
These cover the cost of downloading and maintaining the official ISO images
as released from time to time (downloading a 650MB ISO file with a 56K
modem takes at least 27 hours under ideal conditions), the generating
of CD's on demand, printing, labelling and miscellaneous other
fees.
There are also dispatch costs, but these are dealt with separately.
Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice Project
The OpenOffice project is a collaboration
between Sun Microsystems and the open source development community to develop
a high performance user-centric office application suite. Present versions
include a spreadsheet, word processor and slide design implementation, with
database functionality, cross-platform compatibility with Microsoft Office,
Sun StarOffice, Lotus SmartSuite and others.
OpenOffice is available for a plethora of platforms, including Microsoft Windows, various flavours of Unix, Linux, MacOS and many more.
Want to know more about them?
We've shortly be putting together a short description of each distribution
here. The main effort has been in trying to provide a guide to each distribution's
strong
and weak points while maintaining objectivity (and not favoring one over the
others).