A second Beta release of GNOME 3.8 will be available next week!

Mar 2, 2013 02:31 GMT  ·  By

Javier Jardón Cabezas proudly announced a few days ago that the first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment is ready for download and testing.

GNOME 3.8 Beta 1 has also been delay from the original schedule, six day this time, but it is now available for download and testing on the main GNOME FTP server, bringing many updated components, various improvements, new features, and the usual bugfixes.

“Hi, the first beta release of development cycle heading to GNOME 3.8 is finally available. Sorry for the delay, some technical and personal problems make the release to take more time than expected. With this release we are officially now in "The Freeze",” said Javier Jardón Cabezas in the email announcement.

GNOME 3.8 Beta 1 comes with the following updated applications: NetworkManager, NetworkManager Applet, Baobab, Caribou, Clutter, Cogl, Dconf, Empathy, Epiphany, Evince, Folks, Mutter, Nautilus, Tracker, Vala, Vino and Yelp. The ModemManager and libqmi packages have been added in this release.

The following main GNOME components have been updated in GNOME 3.8 Beta 1: GDM, Glib2, Glib Networking, Gmime, GNOME Calculator, GNOME Contacts, GNOME Desktop, GNOME Control Center, GNOME Disk Utility, GNOME Menus, GNOME Online Accounts, GNOME Session, GNOME Settings Daemon, GNOME Shell, GNOME System Monitor, GNOME Themes Standard, GNOME User Docs, GNOME User Share, GTK+, and a few other core libraries.

The next development release will be GNOME 3.8 Beta 2, which should be available for testing next week, followed by a Release Candidate version at the end of March. The final release of the GNOME 3.8 desktop environment will see the light of day on March 27th, 2013.

Download GNOME 3.8 Beta 1 (3.7.90) sources 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.