I don't usually do stories like this one, but I love this design so much I wanted to share it with you. "Dell has flaunted this gorgeous monitor for a while in various trade shows and press events, always saying that it's just a design concept and not available yet. That all changes now, because the 22-inch Dell Crystal LCD display is suddenly a real product. Just in time for CES, this beauty is set to ship in the next few days, and even though its spec list isn't as high-end as we had hoped, it's still so pretty, if it were smaller we'd want to wear it as a necklace." On a related note, Dell machines are appearing at Best Buy.

The IcedTea project added a PowerPC Java port (both 32 and 64 bit) of OpenJDK. IcedTea 1.5 now also tracks the mercurial repo, provides better GNU/Linux integration by using standard system libraries (libpng, libjpeg, zlib, giflib) and can be bootstrapped with the free gcj/ecj/classpath toolchain. OpenJDK just accepted a new porters group and Gary Benson wrote a guide to porting IcedTea that might be the start of a lot of other Java ports.

FreeBSD 6.3-RC2 has been released. "Sorry for the delay with this phase of the 6.3 release. A few glitches were found during testing of the 6.3-RC2 ISOs that included pre-built packages. The 6.3-RC2 builds for amd64 and i386 should now be available on the majority of the FreeBSD mirror sites. I just finished loading the sparc64 build so that will take a little while to propagate to the mirrors. This is the last planned RC for 6.3. Unless a major show-stopper problem is found the release of 6.3 should happen in about two weeks."

Version 0.2.0 of the Exclaim operating system has been released. "Exclaim is a project aiming to create a lightweight, simple and easy to use operating system from scratch, with POSIX-compliance to allow existing UNIX applications to run on it. It is intended to be suitable to run on old hardware while still being usable at a reasonable speed. The 0.2.0 release supports reading from ATA hard disks and Ext2 filesystems, and includes a simple shell plus a few other programs."

SharpOS 0.0.1 has been released. "The SharpOS project is aimed at writing an operating system in 100% C#. This originally proved to be a problem of nearly philosophical proportions because C# is a managed language, and by nature isn’t designed for such low-level uses as developing an operating system kernel. Please note that although our goal is to create an operating system in C#, the infrastructure we have created allows kernels to be written in any language that targets the Common Intermediate Language bytecodes and exposes pointers and unsafe code."

From all of us at OSNews, we'd like to wish you a happy and healthy new year. In honor of the new year, we'd like to ask you: what headlines do you expect to read in the tech world in 2008? Are you expecting iPhone rev2? Or maybe Vista SP1's success? Perhaps Hardy Heron's world domination? Will Google's Android swallow the cellphone market? Can Facebook continue to rule the roost in social networking? Tell us what you expect in the comments!

FreeBSD 7.0-RC1 has been released. "The ports team has gotten the release package sets built for most of the architectures (sparc64 is still a long way off) so we have begun including the pre-built packages on the ISOs. Even a very basic post-build test turned up one latent bug in sysinstall, and once that was fixed a more extensive test (load both KDE and GNOME) turned up two more latent bugs. The 7.0-RC1 builds have one of the three bugs fixed in them. The other two bugs aren't fatal to installs on 7.0-RC1 (they were fatal to installs on 6.3-RC2) and we have more 7.0-RCs coming so I went ahead with making 7.0-RC1 available as-is."

"While Ubuntu Linux continues to grow - in both popularity and new advancements for the Linux ecosystem - and dance in the limelight, it isn't the choice for everybody. For those that may still be searching for their right Linux mate, Zenwalk 5.0 is a distribution worth trying out. Previously we have referred to Zenwalk as an unsung hero among Linux distributions and with the forthcoming 5.0 release it asserts a very well rounded Xfce desktop."

The Nasdaq market has delisted The SCO Group, the Linux-seller-turned-Linux-litigant now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company's shares were taken off the Nasdaq because of the bankruptcy proceedings, the company said Thursday in a statement. The company had appealed Nasdaq's decision to do so but lost its appeal on December 21, the company said in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"The browser that helped kick-start the commercial web is to cease development because of lack of users. Netscape Navigator, now owned by AOL, will no longer be supported after 1 February 2008, the company has said. In the mid-1990s the browser was used by more than 90% of the web population, but numbers have slipped to just 0.6%. In particular, the browser has faced competition from Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which is now used by nearly 80% of all web users."

"Serenity Systems International is pleased to announce the availability of eComStation 2.0 RC4 for download. eComStation 2.0 will offer unparalleled performance with Bootable JFS and support for multi-core CPUs. This is the eighth public beta release of eComStation 2.0. This product is available for download to all registered eComStation customers with active Software Subscription Services. This version of eComStation 2.0 is the fourth Release Candidate, no big changes or additions will be added before the GA version, it mainly consists of updates to drivers and installation scripts."

"The Debian project is pleased to announce the second update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0. This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems. Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 4.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update against ftp.debian.org after an installation, in order to incorporate those late changes. Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update."

"It's hateful when a developer takes a 'shortcut' that saves that individual a couple of minutes, but thereafter causes extra effort from every single user. Awful as they are, these application design errors - all the fault of lazy developers - are entirely too common."

"Trolltech has released the Qt 4.4.0 technical preview, a pre-release that allows software developers to begin experimenting with the new features that the company has implemented for the next version. I compiled the technical preview release from source code and tested it on my desktop computer with Ubuntu 7.10. For testing purposes, I experimented with several of the new features, examined the included demo applications, and created a few simple programs of my own. The 4.4.0 technical preview adds a new concurrency framework, enhanced XML support, the Phonon media framework, and an integrated HTML renderer widget based on WebKit. This release is also the first to include support for rendering widgets on a GraphicsView component - a feature that will enable Qt developers to create richer and more dynamic user interfaces."