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Are you dazzled by the way you can drag Google Maps around or move from one place to another without having to reload the screen? Or maybe you're a fan of Gmail and its look and feel? If you want to develop Web sites with Google's signature user-friendly features but are afraid of the work involved, take a look at the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

High-performance scalable servers add a new level of complexity to networking and system performance. In this article, learn how to optimize your high-performance Linux system as it uses system board gigabit Ethernet adapters from 1 to 4 nodes. Take a look at problematic networking scalability situations and get tips on how to avoid the pitfalls.

In the second of a three-part series, Alan Cox talks about community and the enterprise.

What follows is an idea that parents could use to focus their children's creativity in a solid way, promote teamwork and a healthy interest in Free Software. Read, think and comment

Red Hat, OpenBravo and the rest of the open source industry missed a huge opportunity this week to connect with eager technology customers in New York. Here's what went wrong, and why it's time for open source application providers to start targeting vertical markets.

StreamMyGame, a way to play PC games on across the internet on other devices, is now coming to Linux. Perhaps this is the best way to play Windows games without using Windows, except that you still have to have a Windows PC.

I remember when getting a decent PC would set you back at least a grand. Then it was $500. Now, it's $150!? That's the story that small vendor LinFX wants you to buy along with its PC with pre-installed Linux. How does LinFX manage to sell a fully operational computer with a 15-inch display for $150? Well, while the Linux distribution, PCLinuxOS 2007, is a state-of-the-art 21st century desktop Linux, the hardware, an IBM NetVista desktop with a 900MHz Intel Pentium III and 256MB of RAM, is right out of the year 2000.

As readers of the first part of this series will remember, your editor has set out on a project to digitize a set of old video tapes and turn them into properly-formatted DVD media suitable for handing out to the grandparents. Part 1 was about the task of capturing this data to disk; part 2 covers the video editors available for turning the captured data into something watchable, and part 3 covers the task of creating a DVD from the edited video.

The schedules for all three days of sessions at the So Cal Linux Expo have been posted to the SCALE web site. All the commercial booths are full and several non-profit groups were added as well. Enlightenment, rarely seen at conferences will be showcasing the work going into E17. This is your opportunity to learn about the desktop that first defined the term "eye candy". Also added were OpenMoko, Damn Small Linux and for the first time ever OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD will each have a booth on the Expo floor.

[If any LXer Readers are going, look for me on Saturday and Sunday reporting on the event for LXer. - Scott]

In the latest Ubuntu weekly newsletter the Ubuntu folks announced the release of the Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop Course. The modular course should take two days to complete all 10 of the lessons offered, but it is possible to cover topics and lessons independently of each other, learning whatever is of interest.

Last week we looked at the tempest over the "phone home" script in Fonality's trixbox CE (Community Edition). The problem has been resolved: A workaround was publicized right away, a fix released within a few days, and the current trixbox CE releases incorporate the fix. I said I would talk to the folks at Fonality, so here we are. I spoke to Chris Lyman, the CEO of Fonality, and Kerry Garrison, the trixbox Community Director, and their security engineers to get their perspective on these events. I also talked to my own little herd of helpful gurus, because while this incident is relatively minor, it's a useful lesson in sorting out conflicting information. The Open Source world is even freer with opinions than it is with code, so sometimes it takes a bit of work to sort things out.

Opus Healthcare provides Web-based software solutions for doctors, nurses, therapists, and healthcare support staff. Recently, Opus moved from Unix on Hewlett-Packard hardware to a mixture of different Linux distributions on Intel. Opus CEO and co-founder Tim Rhoads says it has been a "bottom-up" transition, driven by the company's development staff.

When a number of their coworkers toil away from the office using computers, mobile phones or other electronic equipment, those who do not telecommute are more likely to be dissatisfied with their job and leave the company...

Last week we took a look at the advantages of managed Ethernet switches over dumb switches. Today we are going to run through a batch of networking chores that become easier when they're handled by a smart switch: controlling bad users, QoS, and link aggregation for fat bandwidth on the cheap.

After more than 18 months of planning and development, KDE 4 was released on Friday. The new version of the popular desktop environment is an ambitious revision on almost every level, from the performance and design to the applications and system tools. While it sometimes shows the influence of other desktops, most users should find something to like in the hundreds of new features. However, users' overall verdict may well depend on their tolerance for new layouts and logic.

For quite a while, Java applications have been considered the last choice in meeting one's application needs. Given the offerings I struggled with through the years, I am guilty of such discrimination myself. I would have rather gone without an application than be forced to use a java app. Much has changed.

This highly streamlined text doesn't have a "Who Should Read this Book" section but I guess it should be obvious that anyone who designs websites for a living needs to read it. "High Performance Web Sites" is literally a list of 14 steps (one chapter per step) on techniques you can use to get your web pages to load more quickly and generally improve the performance of your sites on the web. The author has the qualifications to write such a book with authority. He's responsible for performance management at Yahoo! You'd have to assume he knows what he's talking about.

The fork occupies an ambivalent place in the world of open source. On the one hand, it is widely perceived as the worst thing that can happen to a project, pitting hacker against hacker, and dissipating coding effort that could be more usefully applied in a united way. On the other, it is the ultimate test and guarantee of openness: if code cannot be forked, it is not truly open. Perhaps most importantly, it is the threat of the fork, hanging over projects like a digital sword of Damocles, that keeps them close to their constituencies, as free software's short history has shown time and again. The closest that the Linux kernel has come to forking, was during the famous “Linus does not scale” incident that began on 28 September1998 with the innocent question:

MODx, an open source content management system (CMS) and PHP application framework comparable to WordPress or Movable Type, recently won Packt Publishing's Most Promising Open Source CMS award. The application works with either Apache or Internet Information Services (IIS) and supports almost any browser.

One of the best uses for Linux is special-purpose, tightly managed distributions for a single purpose, and Untangle has created one of the most impressive applications of this principle. The Untangle Gateway bundles together a list of applications that even seasoned sysadmins couldn't install and effectively manage in a timely manner.