Are you looking for some good open source educational material and perhaps some new applications to try this Fourth of July weekend? At OStatic, we put together regular collections of tips, tutorials, and recommendations designed to add to your open source arsenal. In this post, you'll find ten of these, ranging from resources for Linux users, to top OSS web development tools, to graphics and music gems, to good ways to get more out of Firefox. Dig in:

Firefox 3.5, Release Candidate 1 is available now. It's being delivered as an automatic update, and the release notes and download are here.

Google: We want Chrome to grow the Web. Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, weighs in on browser innovation.

Will Google Wave revolutionize free software collaboration? What impact might it have on free software users and developers?

A Mozilla update on open video codecs and quality. How does video encoded with Theora compare to video encoded by YouTube?

Will Ubuntu remain a minor player? It has problems in the channel.

Though the Opera browser isn't open source, it's free and its new server-in-a-browser feature, Unite, is really making significant inroads toward online collaboration. If Chrome and Firefox are to keep their edge over Opera, their development teams had better sit up and take notice.

Opera's Unite technology lets users run chat rooms, host Web sites, and share files that even people not using Opera can access. "The interaction is all done via a central Opera Unite server — Opera Unite uses a proxy between the server and its clients (found at operaunite.com) to avoid the need for any special firewall configuration," writes the development team. Unite launched today with six features but is calling on the Opera community to design and create any new services they'd like to see available.

Read on to have a look at what Opera unite can already do and why Google and Mozilla haven't cornered the market on browsers just yet.