OStatic

If you want a fast way to get a long list of excellent open source applications, check into PortableApps.com. I covered this site once before from the perspective of keeping useful open source applications on a pocket USB thumb drive. Since then PortableApps has been steadily adding excellent open source applications to its free downloadable offering, including a good open source task manager, and a useful open source FTP client for those times when you need to move large files around. This is the fastest way I know of to stock up on great OSS apps.

There appears to be no stopping the success Asus is having with its Eee PC subnotebooks. The company is forecasting this week that it will nearly double shipments of the svelte, low-cost machines in the second quarter. Shipments will rise to between 1.2 million to 1.3 million units, the company says, and it expects to move a whopping 5 million units this year. To put that in perspective, Asus shipped 350,000 units in the fourth quarter. Originally all Linux-based, the company will deliver a Windows-based Eee PC in early May. Can we expect the Linux versions to stick around?

Get your OSS education, people. While documentation, including tutorials, is often a weakness with open source applications--even very established ones--the good news is that there are some outstanding free tutorials on the web.

Sometimes these are delivered by the community behind particular projects, and sometimes they are from enthusiasts and other third parties. In this post, I'll round up good, free learning resources--including videos and demos--for top-notch OSS apps, including GIMP, OpenOffice, Firefox, MySQL, SugarCRM, web development languages and more. A little time spent working on your skills at these sites will pay excellent long-term dividends.