GNOME 3.4 Beta 1 Released

The GNOME Project announced a few minutes ago, February 24th, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.4 desktop environment, which brings assorted improvements and features.

The GNOME 3.4 Beta 1 release is ready for testing and it brings updates to main components, such as GNOME Contacts, GNOME Control Center, GNOME Desktop, GNOME Disk Utility, GNOME Panel, GNOME Screensaver, GNOME Session, GNOME Settings Daemon, GNOME Shell, GNOME System Monitor, GNOME Themes Standard, Mousetweaks, and GNOME User Docs.

Moreover, the following apps were updated: NetworkManager (including network-manager-applet), Baobab, Empathy, Evince, Yelp, Nautilus, and Eye of GNOME.

Last but not least, here are the core libraries that were updated in GNOME 3.4 Beta 1: at-spi2-atk, at-spi2-core, clutter, clutter-gst, cogl, folks, glib, glibmm, gmime, gstreamer, gtk+, gtksourceview, libcroco, libgee, libgnomekbd, libsoup, mutter, and pygobject.

The GNOME 3.4 development cycle will continue with a second Beta release on March 7th and the GNOME 3.4 Release Candidate version on March 21st.

The final release of GNOME 3.4 will be available on March 28th, 2012, followed by the first point release on April 18th, GNOME 3.4.1.

GNOME 3.4 Release Schedule:

· October 27th, 2011 - GNOME 3.3.1;
· November 24th, 2011 - GNOME 3.3.2;
· December 23rd, 2011 - GNOME 3.3.3;
· January 26th, 2012 - GNOME 3.3.4;
· February 9th, 2012 - GNOME 3.3.5;
· February 24th, 2012 - GNOME 3.4 Beta 1;
· March 7th, 2012 - GNOME 3.4 Beta 2;
· March 21st, 2012 - GNOME 3.4 RC;
· March 28th, 2012 - GNOME 3.4 Final release

Download the GNOME 3.4 Beta 1 source packages 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.