[DRAFT] F9 Beta release announcement

Jesse, look this over and correct as needed. = = = = = 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, DVD and on-air and satellite digital TV support, YouTube searching, 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 both through our mirroring system and via bittorrent. For direct http access to a local mirror: http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/test/9-Beta/ For a list of mirrors carrying the content and the various protocols they support: http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/9-Beta/ For bittorrent: http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/ More Information: ============ For more information regarding the Beta release, please visit the release notes page: http://fedoraproject.org/f9-beta-relnotes -- Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug