Groovy 1.0 has been released and is available for download from the project homepage. "Groovy is a dynamic language for the JVM that integrates seamlessly with the Java platform. It offers a Java-like syntax, with language features inspired by Smalltalk, Python or Ruby, and lets your reuse all your Java libraries and protect the investment you made in Java skills, tools or application servers. Groovy can be used for various purposes, from ad-hoc shell scripting leveraging Java APIs, to full-blown web applications built on Spring and Hibernate through the Grails web framework. It can also be integrated very easily in your applications to externalize business logic, create Domain-Specific Languages, or to provide templating capabilities, and much more."

"Since KDE 4 development is in full swing with plans for a KDE 4.0 release sometime later this year, I thought I'd put together a weekly piece entitled The Road to KDE 4. The idea is to have a short overview of one or two of the features that show progress in KDE 4. For my first issue, the goal is to show off some of the great SVG work that has taken place so far."

"Arguably one of today's biggest risks for network security and compliance are lingering systems that are no longer supported by their vendors. The security flaws in these systems may have been widely known for years, as is the case with Windows NT 4.0. In this article, we'll examine the risks associated with continuing to run these systems as well as provide some countermeasures that can be used to mitigate these risks."

Volunteers are calling it quits on a project called Fedora Legacy to provide long-term support for Red Hat's hobbyist-oriented Fedora version of Linux. "The Fedora Legacy project is in the process of shutting down," said project organizers Jesse Keating and David Eisenstein in a Fedora Legacy mailing list posting Friday. The organizers didn't provide a specific reason for the decision, but a lack of contributions from outside programmers contributed, Keating said in a separate mailing list posting.

The first Apple bug (Apple Quicktime rtsp URL Handler Stack-based Buffer Overflow) of Month Of Apple Bugs has been unveiled - as promised - by LMH and Kevin Finisterre. This bug is the first in a month long series.

"It has been one year to the day since XGI Technology had last released a Volari Linux display driver and about 14 months since we had first delivered word of XGI considering open-source 3D display drivers. Where do things now stand for XGI Technology? We will tell you all of the details today where things are for this Taiwan graphics company."

Hell was already frozen anyway, but apparantly, the SkyOS team is trying to bring hell's temperature to absolute zero, since they are saying 2007 might see a release of SkyOS 5. "After what seems about 30 years worth of work (I'm sure even more to Robert), SkyOS will finally be released to the public. Lots of details are still being worked out on this one (as well as the obvious issues still present in the system), but we're really shooting to make it happen."

About a week ago the Elive project released version 0.6 of their E17-based (installable) live CD. Since Elive is one of the few distributions using E17 as its standard desktop environment, we thought we would treat you to a nice screenshot tour.

"Here's a little thought experiment to take into the New Year. Not as difficult as Schrodinger's Cat, but thought provoking nevertheless. Imagine that you woke up tomorrow to a world without Microsoft. Not a world where Microsoft never existed, but one where it hit some hidden critical corporate mass and imploded, or it was discovered that the Windows source code was actually the DNA sequence for red cabbage, and all the directors disappeared to a hidden undersea stronghold. Whatever really... Microsoft existed and now it doesn't."

Returning to a biannual release cycle, the developers of Mandriva released a few days ago an initial alpha build of what will eventually become Mandriva Linux 2007.1: "Mandriva Linux 2007 Alpha1 (Hangzhou). This alpha version is available via two means. Firstly via the public FTP and HTTP sites mirroring the Mandriva Linux repository. Second, the preferred way, via either the provided One CDs (installable live CDs), or the installation mini CD i586 and x86_64." Screenshots are available.

Just in time for the new year, the PC-BSD team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PC-BSD version 1.3 for public download. You may download this release and view the change log. The team is also launching a web design contest for the new web site of 2007.

Virtualization means many things to many people. A big focus of virtualization currently is server virtualization, or the hosting of multiple independent operating systems on a single host computer. This article explores the ideas behind virtualization and then discusses some of the many ways to implement virtualization. We also look at some of the other virtualization technologies out there, such as operating system virtualization on Linux.

Since it's year end, I thought I'd post one more "fun piece" for everybody. After Thom posted an article on his customized KDE desktop, I thought it might be interesting to compare desktop screengrabs and see what other OSNews'ers desktops look like. Are you cluttered or clean? Are you minialist? What's your wallpaper? Upload a picture to an online service or your own website and show off your desktop. I'll start: Adam's desktop (312kb).

Half of our readers are away in this holiday season, so traffic and news items are considerably down comparatively to normal weekdays. Why don't we have some Holiday Fun (TM) with a poll? Our friends at Slashdot put a poll up asking about your favorite sci-fi TV series, but they forgot two very important entries as their readers mentioned quickly afterwards: the most famous TV series of the '90s "The X-Files", and the already cult classic "Firefly". So we thought we recreate the same poll, but with these options in play, just so we see what our (mostly geek) readership likes the most. Even if we only have ~1/10 of Slashdot's traffic we can still have some fun with it!