The first Beta for FreeBSD 7.2 has been released, updating network drivers as well as some threading libraries. The FreeBSD 7.2 release is the first point upgrade since the 7.1 release which became generally available in January of this year. The final release of FreeBSD 7.2 is currently scheduled for the first week of May.

The other day the beta 2 disks were released to the testers team. Thanks to the wonderful feedback by the testers for beta 1, we were able to get a lot of things fixed. Fabio is back from his vacation and so it took him a bit to get through all the emails. There is still a few known issues and will hopefully get addressed in 5.0 RC1.

Last week marked the release of the Ubuntu 9.04 Beta and this week there is the planned release of the Fedora 11 Beta. Being the Linux benchmarking fanatics that we are, we set out to run a few performance tests comparing the Ubuntu 9.04 Beta to the latest Rawhide packages that will make up today's Fedora 11 Beta release.

Few weeks ago ubuntu 10.04 beta was released, if you have ubuntu 9.10 karmic koala installed in a virtual machine or in an old computer and you want to test this beta release you can upgrade using these commands.

The Ubuntu team has announced the beta release of Ubuntu 7.10 and its variants, including Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu. The final release of Ubuntu 7.10, dubbed "Gutsy Gibbon," will happen sometime next month.

Today, I ran an upgrade of my laptop, which runs Ubuntu. A nice little feature that came with this particular upgrade is a working installation of Firefox 3. About 2 months ago, I upgraded to Firefox 3, but it was in an unusable state, so back to Firefox 2.0 I went. With this working version though, I have to say that a downgrade back to Firefox 2 won’t happen again.

I turned on my laptop running the Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid beta (I think we're still technically on "beta 2") and found more than 100 updates ready for me. When I rebooted, I noticed that the button order on application windows changed — again.

On March 26 Ubuntu 9.04 Beta was released. I installed it on my main desktop system as soon as it was available, so I've been running it for a few days now. If you're interested in trying out this beta release, remember that it's intended for testing and not mission-critical systems. The release candidate is coming on April 16, and the final on April 23.

Amarok 2.1 Beta 1 is out in the wild! Featuring one of the longest ChangeLogs in Amarok history, this beta release showcases what is possible when building on the strong technical foundations that have been laid with Amarok 2.0. Nearly all parts of Amarok have received attention, and while not a final release, it is already very usable and quite stable.