Fedora 12 Beta Released!

The Beta release of Fedora 12 “Constantine” is out today! To get the latest bits, start by visiting our prerelease site and choose your architecture and download method. Remember that we have BitTorrent available, and we encourage everyone to give back a little to the community by seeding whenever possible.

But wait! There’s more! Yup, we have documentation:

• A draft copy of the Fedora 12 Release Notes
• The release announcement, containing a short summary of important changes
• A listing of known issues in Fedora 12 Beta

We have about four weeks at last count to the final release of Fedora 12, and this is a great time to download, install, and try out the Beta! I’m installing it right now to an Asus EeePC 701SD that I just bought from a buddy, as a matter of fact. It’s also running on my Dell XPS M1330 laptop, and my Dell XPS 730x workstation, and humming right along on all of them. I love this time in the development cycle because just like anyone else, I can run the latest release before it’s out. I can find all the improvements and little things that make daily work and life easier, and show them off to friends and colleagues.

And of course, like other community members, I can beat the bushes to identify lingering problems here and there where I see them, and file them as bugs. And since I know that Fedora has a strong relationship with upstream communities, when we find fixes, we can work with those communities to ensure that the solutions are made available to everyone. That’s how free software’s supposed to work, right? Anti-hoarding, and pro-helping.

The whole Fedora community has really been knocking themselves out getting all sorts of fixes done and worked through the upstream. I’m really proud of how you guys uphold the principles of collaborating with the communities that make our distribution — heck, any distribution — possible. And I want to give a hearty pat on the back in particular to the Fedora QA team, for a sustained, exceptional effort on making this release as good as humanly possible. The whole Fedora community owes you guys a $BEVERAGE, which means FUDPub may take you a while to get through.

So grab a bitstream of Fedora 12 Beta, burn it to disc or USB, pop it in a spare machine (or virtual guest), and let the magic begin! The countdown to the final release of Fedora 12 starts now…