The Beta release is the point at which we really want and need the wider community's help with testing. Beta is a point of much greater stability in Fedora's development branch, but some fixes continue to occur to improve usability, performance, and stability. This release is great for early adopters and Linux enthusiasts! The Fedora 9 Beta boots on the majority of systems, and gives you an idea of how the final Fedora 9 will look and feel. Most importantly, we absolutely need community assistance to check features and provide feedback and bug reports, to help ensure that Fedora 9 is our best release ever.

Some highlights of Fedora 9 Beta:

* GNOME 2.22, with new features like a helpful world time clock, better file system performance, security improvements, power management at the login screen, the ability to dynamically configure displays, better Bluetooth integration, improved podcast support, and many other enhancements
* KDE 4.0.2, which includes a brand new desktop and panel with many new concepts, integrated desktop search, a brand new visual style called Oxygen, a new multimedia API called Phonon, and a new hardware integration framework called Solid -- all integrated by Fedora's KDE SIG
* Firefox 3 Beta 5, featuring a native look and feel, desktop integration, the new Places that replaces bookmarks, and a reworked address bar
* Support for resizing ext2, ext3 and NTFS partitions during install
* Support for creating and installing to encrypted filesystems
* PackageKit, a cross-distribution package management solution with a complete yum backend, designed to unify different distributions' software management with the latest technologies
* Kernel 2.6.25-rc5

And numerous other improvements and enhancements.