Ahh the smell of spring is in the air! What does that mean? Beta software of course! First out of the blocks is for our linux friends.. and it’s the Fedora 9 OS. Here is the official first look at this beta.

The Beta release is the point at which we really want and need the wider community’s help with testing. Beta is a point of much greater stability in Fedora’s development branch, but some fixes continue to occur to improve usability, performance, and stability. This release is great for early adopters and Linux enthusiasts!

The Fedora 9 Beta boots on the majority of systems, and gives you an idea of how the final Fedora 9 will look and feel. Most importantly, we absolutely need community assistance to check features and provide feedback and bug reports, to help ensure that Fedora 9 is our best release ever.

Some highlights of Fedora 9 Beta:

* GNOME 2.22, with new features like a helpful world time clock, better
file system performance, security improvements, power management at the
login screen, the ability to dynamically configure displays, better
Bluetooth integration, improved podcast support, and many other
enhancements

* KDE 4.0.2, which includes a brand new desktop and panel with many new
concepts, integrated desktop search, a brand new visual style called
Oxygen, a new multimedia API called Phonon, and a new hardware
integration framework called Solid — all integrated by Fedora’s KDE SIG

* Firefox 3 Beta 5, featuring a native look and feel, desktop
integration, the new Places that replaces bookmarks, and a reworked
address bar

* Support for resizing ext2, ext3 and NTFS partitions during install

* Support for creating and installing to encrypted filesystems

* PackageKit, a cross-distribution package management solution with a
complete yum backend, designed to unify different distributions’
software management with the latest technologies

* Kernel 2.6.25-rc5

And numerous other improvements and enhancements.

Getting it:
===========

The Beta release is available through the following download methods:
* (recommended) BitTorrent, an efficient and easy distributed
file-sharing system
* Jigdo, an alternative system that reduces download size in some
situations, or for people who can’t use BitTorrent
* direct download from a mirror location near you

So there you have it .. very early look indeed, so go out and have a look - it’s free!

[via redhat]

Tags: beta, beta software, early adopters, fedora, fedora 9, linux, linux enthusiasts, Software, Technology