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Since its inception, we've tried to make collections of tips, pointers to free tutorials, and advice on the best applications a regular part of the editorial content here at OStatic. These have included screenshot-driven guided tours to how to use top tier OSS applications, pointers to free tutorials on everything from AJAX to OpenOffice, and guidance on finding free open source webinars on topics such as MySQL and Ubuntu. We're in the process of putting up a dedicated repository for all of these, but in the meantime, here are 12 of our most popular educational roundup posts.

Unlike a lot of open-source supporters, I don't turn red with anger at the very thought of Novell working with Microsoft. Like it or not, getting Linux and Windows to work better together makes good, hard business sense. What I do find annoying is that Novell is continuing to feed Microsoft's FUD machine about Linux. In an e-mail interview with Ian Bruce, Novell's public relations director, Bruce wrote me that customers wanted the Novell/Microsoft package, in part, because it "provides IP (intellectual property) peace of mind for organizations operating in mixed source environments." It does? Since when?

A fine Saturday to you, or Sunday if you're an Australian who (according to my time charts) lives in the future ;) Today, we've got some more jokes and humour, of a Unix and Linux flavour. None of our senses of humour are probably exactly the same, but I try to pick out some halfway decent stuff for you and then, of course, refer you to the joke page where I found these little nuggets and heartily recommend that you check out the main workjoke.com site just in case you find a whole bunch of other stuff that makes you laugh on their other pages. I can't vouch for the content on a site I don't control (a lot of the jokes there are the same ones you've heard 50 times already today), but I thought this site offered a good bit of variety and some fresh material that warranted a little wholesome all-American co-opting. Of course, the credit for the content goes first to workjoke and then to the respective authors to whom they give attribution.

AcetoneISO2, is a feature-rich and complete software application to manage CD/DVD images. Thanks to powerful open source tools such as fuseiso, AcetoneISO2 will let You mount typical proprietary images formats of the Windows world such as ISO BIN NRG MDF IMG and is more than a simple ISO mount software.

The Master view in Impress is the equivalent of page styles in Writer. It's the view where you can set elements of design that appear throughout your presentation, such as the slide background and foreground colors, any reoccurring elements, and the fonts. By creating the master slides you need before you add content, you can automate your work and free yourself to focus on content.

FOSS is rather like a good sourdough culture, because a properly cared-for sourdough culture will live and feed people forever. You can't take from it without giving it a little something back because then it will die.

It's been literally impossible to escape the news that Intel demonstrated its next generation Classmate design at IDF in San Francisco this week. And I have to admit the machine seems quite impressive and apparently Intel has also done some pretty neat things in terms of overlaying a simplified UI over the vanilla Windows XP installation. But let's take it step-by-step, shall we?

When Linux crashes, users don't get a Blue Screen like they do on Windows. Instead, Linux generates an "oops" -- a crash signature that can help developers to figure out what went wrong. Keeping track of the "oopses" is the duty of the Kerneloops.org project, and according to supporters, its efforts have improved kernel quality and fixed a large number of bugs -- a thrust that's critical for Linux as it angles for even greater adoption in the enterprise and elsewhere.

Sun Microsystems is setting out to create an open source, royalty-free video codec. Given the considerable head start of well-known, royalty-free video codecs like Dirac and Theora, you might ask why the world needs another. The answer, according to Sun, is the process the company will use to develop it -- starting with a full-on, careful examination of the patent situation. I spoke with Gerard Fernando and Rob Glidden about the project, which was unveiled in April. Fernando is a senior staff engineer at Sun, and Glidden is the company's global alliance manager for TV and media.

One of the nation's largest electronic voting systems has a software flaw that can cause it to drop ballots, its manufacturer has revealed. Premier Election Solutions -- a subsidiary of Diebold -- says its machines that operate in 34 states are affected by the glitch. The problem, it is believed, has been present in the program for the past decade.

Organizations have many ways to connect, collaborate, and keep in touch with co-workers, team members, and colleagues -- which can lead to multiple logins and user accounts, services spread across the Web, or services that are simply not accessible to all team members on various types of devices. Kablink (formerly ICECore) recognizes that centralization and accessibility are major components to successful project collaboration, and its latest offering is worth a project leader's second look.

Linux kernel maintainer Andrew Morton is fond of saying, "If you want the kernel team to do something, make us look bad." Perhaps somewhat in that spirit, a blog called "Linux Photography" has carefully outlined where Linux falls short today as a world-class environment for serious, production-oriented professional photographers.

Ulteo Application System is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Kubuntu and designed to work with the Ulteo Online Desktop service to provide you with an automatic offsite backup and file synchronization between live CD instances. It attempts to require as little user configuration and maintenance as possible, and provides several unique features that set it apart from being "just another distribution." On my test machine, a Sempron 2800 with 512MB of memory, Ulteo took almost three minutes to boot from the live CD -- quite a bit longer than most live CDs take on this system. Ulteo made up for this, however, when copying files during the installation -- that took a mere five minutes. There was little user intervention required during the installation besides selection of a username and password and my location, although I chose to partition my disk manually instead of allowing the installer to do it.

The Software Freedom Law Center, which provides legal help to the free and open-source software community, has released a detailed document that describes how users and vendors can ensure they are in compliance with the open-source GNU General Public License (GPL). Initially, GPL compliance was enforced through informal means, such as bulletin board discussions, but as Linux's profile grew in ensuing years, enforcement efforts became more organised and ultimately entered the courts, the report notes. Last year, Skype was found guilty of violating the GPL by a Munich, Germany regional court.

Developers of Android, the Linux mobile platform spearheaded by Google Inc., are asking security experts for input. The latest software development kit for Android was released earlier this week and plans are for the 1.0 version of the operating system to be shipped on mobile phones later this year. Security is a priority. "As you may expect, building and maintaining a secure mobile platform is a difficult task," wrote the Android Security Team.

Microsoft has announced a $300M dollar ad campaign, featuring 90s TV star Jerry Seinfeld, which according to multiple reports has been designed to save Vista and salvage Microsoft's battered reputation. There is so much wrong with this strategy, it's really hard to know where to start.

Internet monitoring company, Pingdom, has plotted the popularity of the various Linux distributions by geography on the basis of how often their names are used in Google searches. Rigorous it may not be, but this 'distribution of distributions' is certainly fascinating.

Linux ext2/3 filesystem stores superblock at different backup location so it is possible to get back data from corrupted partition. This aricle explains how to recover a bad superblock from a corrupted ext3 partition to get back data.

Remember the good old days? Like back in 1999 when you could, as a friend of mine put it,"make a hundred thousand dollars a year for being able to spell Java." Those were the days, back when programmers driving Porsches had become a cliché. Now, more than a decade after the dot-com boom began, tech people once again find themselves earning less money despite bringing significantly more value to their employers.

IOC President, Jacques Rogge, was recently forced to back-pedal under a barrage of criticism when it became clear that assurances that the press corps would have "unrestricted" Internet access were no more than piecrust promises. Nevertheless, the technology behind the "Golden Shield Project", which is apparently a means of protecting the Chinese from criminal content and has earned the nickname "Great Firewall of China", is relatively simple. Journalists in the Olympic village, as well as western corporations and even private individuals have a range of tools at their disposal to ensure their Internet access is both full and unmonitored. However, most of these are based on anonymizing services, such as gateways, proxies or web services, that massage the content and smuggle it in under the censor's nose.