” GNOME 3, the first major-version revision of the popular
desktop environment in eight years, is slated for release in April.
The good news is that you can now easily take the new release for a
test spin with a spare USB key, and provide some real-world
feedback to the project before the final code gets released into
the wild.“To test GNOME 3 for yourself, you can download 32-bit and
64-bit ISO images built by Frederic Crozat. Crozat updated the
first builds for FOSDEM, and said he plans to do so periodically;
the underlying system is based on openSUSE. The images can be
burned onto a bootable CD or DVD, but if you install them onto a
USB flash memory stick instead, you can take advantage of
persistence to preserve changes, documents, and additional packages
you install. There are also Fedora-based images created by the
distribution, and Ubuntu repository packages for GNOME Shell, the
desktop user interface, although it is not clear how often either
of the latter are updated.”