Ubuntu has walked away with Best Distribution at the Linux Awards held in London last night.

Maggie Meer of UK Linux magazine Linux User and Developer presided over the show with guest presenter Perry McCarthy—formerly of BBC TV car show Top Gear—who kept the awards rolling.

Canonical’s Jane Silber was there to pick up the award, a transparent, and extremely sharp glass trophy with the wording UBUNTU engraved into the glassword. Jane spent the rest of the evening closely guarding her new toy.

Also at the ceremony Jon “maddog” Hall picked up the Lifetime contribution recognition, won last year by Linux kernel developer Alan Cox. Representing the four boys from Wolverhampton, Jono Bacon took home the prize for Best Open Source marketing campaign on behalf of LUG Radio Live 2006, narrowly beating Ubuntu’s Ship IT free CD-ROM scheme.

Fans will be pleased to know that following a previous incident, Jono’s famous beard has grown back.

Reading out the nominations, Perry McCarty had great fun with some of the more interesting project and company names, at one point tongue-twisting himself over Canonical (“Camomica”). After the meal and award ceremony, dancing and drinking continued at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel until late into the morning.

The trophy only mentioned Ubuntu, but we’re sure that this includes Edubuntu and Kubuntu aswell. Pictures will follow as soon as we at El Fridge have managed to wrestle the gong away from Jane’s firm grip… Congratulations all around!

Ubuntu was awarded a PC World 2006 World Class Award, identifying it as one of PC World’s 100 Best Products of the Year — all the way up at number 27! Ubuntu was the only Linux distribution listed, but is among quite a number of Open Source and Free Software friends. Hooray!

“Products that win PC World’s World Class Awards set the standard for excellence in the IT and consumer electronics industries,” stated Harry McCracken, editor in chief of PC World. “From notebook computers and security software to music players and Web sites, the editors reward the most outstanding performers in this annual awards program. Congratulations to Ubuntu.”

[Discuss]

Ubuntu has won Distribution of the Year in the 2005 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards, an annual poll of the user support website’s forum members.

We’d like to thank the academy— wait, no, that’s a totally different award. We’d like to thank the readers of LinuxQuestions.org for supporting Ubuntu!

On October 5th at the LinuxWorld Award ceremomy in London, Ubuntu received the user-nominated award for best open source distribution. Some of the other winners during the evening included Alan Cox for a lifetime achievement award for his work with the Linux Kernel, SpreadFirefox for best marketing campaign, Joomla for best open source project, and Rackspace for best open source ISP.