GNOME 3.8 Beta 2 Is Now Available for Testing

Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias from the GNOME Release Team was happy to announce a few days ago that the second and last Beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment was ready for download and testing.

This time, the release has been delayed with only two days from the original schedule and it is available for download and testing on the main GNOME FTP server, bringing numerous updated components, several improvements across basic apps, new features, countless bugfixes and many updated translations.

"Hi, the second beta release of development cycle heading to GNOME 3.8 is finally available. With this release we are officially now in "The String Freeze" (that stacks with all the current freezes): - String Freeze: no string changes may be made without confirmation from the l10n team (gnome-i18n@) and notification to both the release team and the GDP (gnome-doc-list@)," said Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias in the official release announcement.

GNOME 3.8 Beta 2 comes with the following updated applications: Baobab, Empathy, Eye of GNOME, Evolution, Nautilus, Vino, Brasero, Cheese, DevHelp, Gedit, Glade, Orca, SeaHorse, Vinagre, File Roller and Accerciser.

This Beta also updates the following main GNOME components: GNOME Calculator, GNOME Contacts, GNOME Control Center, GNOME Desktop, GNOME Font Viewer, GNOME Icon Theme, GNOME Keyring, GNOME Online Accounts, GNOME Session, GNOME Boxes, GNOME Documents, GNOME Settings Daemon, GNOME Shell, GNOME Terminal, GTK+, GDM, and a few other core libraries and games.

The next development release will be GNOME 3.8 RC (Release Candidate), which should be available for testing sometime at the end of next week, followed by the final release of the GNOME 3.8 desktop environment on March 27, 2013.

Download GNOME 3.8 Beta 2 (3.7.91) 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.