May 4, 2011 11:54 GMT  ·  By

Antoni Norman proudly announced a few days ago, May 1st, that the Beta release of the upcoming Pinguy OS 11.04 operating system is available for download and testing.

Pinguy OS 11.04 is an operating system that will be based on the recently released Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Linux distribution, but without the Unity interface. Pinguy OS uses the classic look of the GNOME desktop environment with Docky.

Pinguy OS 11.04 Beta is more stable than the Alpha version released one month ago, and it adds the powerful GNOME NetworkManager utility to manage your network connections, as a replacement for ConnMan.

Conky has been set by default in this Beta, and the developer promised that he'll most likely change the default wallpaper for the final release. Users can vote for the final Pinguy OS 11.04 wallpaper here.

"Most of the bugs that where in the Alpha are now sorted apart from Compiz auto starting. But I have added an entry into "Startup Applications". To see if Compiz works alt+F2 and type: bin/Docky"

"The beta has mostly unchanged from the alpha apart from the original Conky is now set as the default and ConnMan has been remove and gnome-network-manager has been put back. This is mainly because ConnMan is still missing a few features that many people will need. Like seeing hidden networks." - said Antoni Norman on the forum post.

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Pinguy OS 11.04 Beta
Compiz has been disabled from this Beta version of Pinguy OS 11.04 to minimize the bugs reported in the Alpha release. To enable Compiz, users can find an entry in the Startup Applications utility (just check the box in front of it and reboot the machine).

We don't have an exact date for the final release of Pinguy OS 11.04, but the developer says that most of the PPAs will be removed and Pinguy OS will have its own software repositories, in order to have more control over the package updates.

Download Pinguy OS 11.04 Beta right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta release and it should NOT be installed on production machines.