I'm in the midst of preparing for our open source application workshop for Computers and Writing 2007, so I thought I'd share two things I found this week that would assist educators in setting up a multimedia lab with software that doesn't require purchasing the expensive Adobe Creative Suite:

• Ubuntu Studio is a version of Ubuntu Linux configured with many multimedia applications. Now that Dell will be offering Ubuntu, one would hope that those machines should support Ubuntu Studio, too, without hardware conflicts. How much cheaper would a computer lab be if software licensing was not a cost?
• As an alternative for the lab that already has Windows XP machines, check out Roll Your Own Creative Suite at ZDNet.co.uk. Some of the apps are open source; others are freeware.