Qt is one of the most popular GUI toolkits in the open source world, and it serves as the foundation of the KDE project. Getting started with it is a snap.

Take a stroll down Memory Lane and learn about XFree86 -- from its humble beginnings to its current status as the official X.

Python has become one of the open source community's most popular scripting languages. Guido van Rossum, Python's creator, shares his thoughts on where it's going.

Get under the hood of MySQL to find out how you can speed up your database applications.

People often say that Linux is difficult to install. One reason for that view is that most lack experience installing operating systems. As those of us who have tried can testify, every operating system is difficult to install -- including Microsoft Windows. Today, few people actually install Windows, as it comes pre-installed. If most computers had Linux pre-installed, then people would complain about the difficulty of installing Windows.

A Trolltech employee once said he wouldn't consider Linux a success until his mother was running it. I don't think the Mom Test is necessarily a fair one, but I get his point: When Linux penetrates the average user's home or office, it will have passed a significant milestone.

Despite years of hype about the coming paperless office, printing has actually become more frequent and more complex as time has passed, not less so. Ordinary users now routinely print tens or even hundreds of pages a week, a significant fraction of which is high-end, photo-quality graphics.

In the past two months, this column has introduced some of the functions necessary for writing networked programs. We've been throwing around terms like TCP, UDP, IP, and others without any real description of what they mean. This month, you should gain a better understanding of these abbreviations and exactly what is going on when they are used to communicate between machines. With this knowledge, you will be better equipped to determine exactly which protocol is appropriate for your applications -- for instance, why UDP is often used for broadcast-style transmissions, while TCP is used for transactions.

The folks at Red Hat recently selected the open source PostgreSQL database as the foundation for their commercial Red Hat Database product. This decision, however, was not made without a good deal of whining from the ranks of the MySQL faithful, who weren't able to fully comprehend why it was that their baby had been passed over.

When the Department of Justice announced that it would no longer seek to break up Microsoft, it really wasn't important news. Let's get real. Microsoft was never going to be broken up. No, the real news was that the Department of Justice wasn't going to prosecute Microsoft for illegally tying Internet Explorer to Windows 95.

ASL Marquis K-121S

March Networks SME Server 5

The subject of Linux on the desktop is always a sticky one. One reason is that many people believe that Linux just plain does not belong on the desktop -- or at least on the mainstream desktop; they believe it will always be preferred as a server OS.