One-Stop Shopping for Open Source Manuals

by Ostatic Staff - Jul. 05, 2011

Every so often, we at OStatic compile documentation and guidance resources for popular open source platforms and applications, and one of the best ongoing projects for producing free open source-related documentation is FLOSS Manuals. It's an ongoing and ambitious effort to build online guides for open source software that we initially covered in this post. FLOSS Manuals provides reference resources for titles such as OpenOffice, Firefox, Audacity, Blender, Inkscape and more. There are also several new types of documentation on the site, and our updated guide to FLOSS Manuals is found here.

One of the newest guides on FLOSS Manuals, which will be of interest to many browser users, is a complete guide to Chromium--the open source core of Google's Chrome browser. The guide walks through the differences between Chromium and Chrome, provides installation guidelines for all major operating systems, and much more.

Not long ago, FLOSS Manuals also added resources such as this one providing guidance for people living under restrictive government regimes so that they can bypass Internet censorship.

In case you're not a Handbrake fane, here is a free guide to Handbrake from FLOSS Manuals, which is one of the best open source applications for working with video and DVDs. And here is a free guide to Campcaster, which is open source radio management software that is especially good for producing live broadcasts. FLOSS Manuals also has an excellent, free guide to VLC Media Player, one of the very best open source media players.

FLOSS Manuals also has by far the most accessible free introduction to Inkscape's main features, found here. Inkscape is a powerful graphics and vector drawing tool.

At the FLOSS Manuals site you can also find a good, concise, free online guide to installing Blender on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, found here. Blender is one of the best graphics and animation products around, and it's free and open source.

You can also find a complete guide to basic Internet security at FLOSS Manuals, which was recently updated at the site. If you're at all interested in mastering good open source applications, FLOSS Manuals is a treasure trove of resources. Check it out.

And if you're looking for Linux-specific documentation, see our recent post on the topic.