There has not been a new development release of Fedora 12 since the Constantine Alpha release back in August. However, the second and last development release, Fedora 12 Beta, is set to be released next week. It has been delayed a few times already, but Fedora 12 Beta packs all of the features that are to be found in Fedora 12 with the final development freeze already in effect.

The Fedora project has announced the availability of the Fedora 11 beta release. Fedora 11 includes several compelling new features such as support for kernel modesetting, Ext4 by default, and faster boot time.

The Fedora Project Team announced yesterday, the release of Fedora 11 (Leonidas) Beta. Getting closer and closer to the final release, Fedora 11 promises to bring a lot of major changes and improvements along with bleeding-edge technologies to enable a modern operating system. Coming in two flavors, Fedora 11 Beta uses the following desktop environments: GNOME 2.26 RC and KDE 4.2.1.

Last week marked the release of the Ubuntu 9.04 Beta and this week there is the planned release of the Fedora 11 Beta. Being the Linux benchmarking fanatics that we are, we set out to run a few performance tests comparing the Ubuntu 9.04 Beta to the latest Rawhide packages that will make up today's Fedora 11 Beta release.

Fedora 17 GNOME beta, as well as the beta of the KDE, LXDE and Xfce Spins, were released yesterday – almost two weeks past due date. This, however, is not highly unusual for the Fedora project. Unlike Ubuntu, their release schedule is not cast in concrete. They are more interested in getting stuff that works out the door, instead of shoving something out to meet a set deadline.

The beta release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring (code name Margaux) is now available. This beta version provides some updates on major desktop components of the distribution, including KDE 4.2.0, GNOME 2.25.90, Xfce 4.6 RC1, X.org server 1.5, OpenOffice.Org 3.0.1, qt 4.5.0 (RC1)

We have already published a look at the Fedora 13 Beta, delivered ATI Radeon benchmarks atop Fedora 13 Beta, and have other articles on the way covering this new Fedora release, while in this article we are investigating Nouveau's power performance using this newest Fedora release.

So Fedora 17 beta was supposed to have been released on April 3. Today is April 5 and we are still waiting. But that is the way it is with the Fedora project. Release dates are not set in concrete. They will release something when it is ready, not to meet a predetermined release schedule.

The beta release is the last important milestone of Fedora 13. Only critical bug fixes will be pushed as updates leading up to the general release of Fedora 13, scheduled to be released in the middle of May.