With only one month remaining until the much anticipated release of the GNOME desktop environment, the development team launched the first beta version of GNOME 2.26. The announcement comes from Frederic Peters, who stated: "This is the sixth development release, and the first beta, towards our 2.26 release that will happen in March 2009.  By now most things are in place, and your mission is easy: Go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it." The GNOME 2.25.x is an unstable series of releases especially developed for testing and hacking, as this will become the stable GNOME 2.26, due for release on March 18th, 2009.

For this release, no user interface changes are to be made and no features should be added without the approval of the release team. The next two phases are the string freeze, announced for February 16th, and the code freeze, due on March 9th. To help build the GNOME desktop, the devs recommend using GARNOME, a tool that downloads, builds and installs the latest versions of the desktop environment from tarball releases.

As we reported a few months ago, some of the most important features expected to come with the GNOME 2.26 release, consist of a new interface with a darker default theme, a compact widget theme for smaller screens, an initial set of 256x256 icons and redesigned GNOME panel icons. Also awaited are an updated Evolution Mail, a GNOME Control Center featuring support for launching arbitrary commands via keybindings, and a new volume control in the form of a PulseAudio mixer or other high-level device control user interface.

GNOME 2.26 Release Schedule:

November 5th, 2008 - GNOME 2.25.1
December 3rd,2008 - GNOME 2.25.2 release
December 17th, 2008 - GNOME 2.25.3 release
January 7th, 2009 - GNOME 2.25.4 release
January 21st, 2009 - GNOME 2.25.5 release
February 4th, 2009 - GNOME 2.25.90 Beta release
February 18th, 2009 - GNOME 2.25.91 Beta release
March 4th, 2009 - GNOME 2.25.92 RC release
March 18th, 2009 - GNOME 2.26.0 Final Release

You can download the sources for GNOME 2.26 Beta right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.