F9 Beta Release Announcement

Ah, spring… when a young penguin’s fancy lightly turns to
thoughts of… Beta testing! Yes, spring has sprung, and so has the
Beta release of Fedora 9!

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.
• The full release notes are available at:
  http://fedoraproject.org/f9-beta-relnotes

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

To download, visit:
http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease

More Information

For more information regarding the Beta release, please visit
the release notes page:
http://fedoraproject.org/f9-beta-relnotes