The Gnome team has released a Beta version of the Gnome Desktop Environment, version 2.28.0 beta1.

This is the announcement from the Gnome team regarding this beta release:

This is the sixth development release, and the first beta, towards our 2.28 release that will happen in September 2009. By now most things are in place, and your mission is easy: Go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it.

With this release, we are now even more frozen; developer API/ABI were already, and at this point all new API are hopefully documented; no UI changes may be made without approval from the release team and notification to the documentation project, and no new features without approval from the release team. We also remain in the string change announcement period -- all string changes must be announced to both the gnome-doc-list and gnome-i18n lists.

To compile GNOME 2.27.90, you can use GARNOME [1] (which supports users and has additional/different modules available), or the jhbuild [2] modulesets [3] (which use the exact tarball versions from the official release):

[1] http://www.gnome.org/projects/garnome/
[2] http://library.gnome.org/devel/jhbuild/
[3] http://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/2.27.90/

The release notes that describe the changes between 2.27.5 and 2.27.90 are available. Go read them to learn all the goodness of this release:

• platform
• desktop
• admin
• bindings
• devtools
• mobile

The GNOME 2.27.90 release is available here:

• platform sources
• desktop sources
• admin sources
• bindings sources
• devtools sources
• mobile sources