Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 4, which will in time become Ubuntu 7.04 was just released. The stable release is scheduled for April 19th 2007.
Pre-releases of Feisty are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system, or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are however recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs. Installing a milestone and then upgrading through the release cycle should leave you with a close approximation of the final release.
Herd 4 is the fourth in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Feisty development cycle. The Herd images are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD build or installer bugs, while representing current snapshots of Feisty. You can download it here, for Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu:
Ubuntu:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/feisty/herd-4/
http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/DVDs/ubuntu/feisty/herd-4/
http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-cdimages/feisty/herd-4/
http://ubuntu-cdimage.datahop.it/releases/feisty/herd-4/
http://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/feisty/herd-4/
Kubuntu:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/feisty/herd-4/
http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/DVDs/kubuntu/feisty/herd-4/
http://ubuntu-cdimage.datahop.it/kubuntu/releases/feisty/herd-4/
http://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/feisty/herd-4/
Edubuntu:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/feisty/herd-4/
See http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Archive for access instructions.
The primary focus during the time from Herd 3 has been a mix of feature development and bug fixing. Please refer to http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/herd4 for information on changes in Ubuntu, and https://wiki.kubuntu.org/FeistyFawn/Herd4/Kubuntu for changes in Kubuntu.
This is an early set of images, so you can expect some bugs. Among these are the following (so you do not need to bother reporting these if you encounter them):
* The desktop CD fails to reboot when the graphical installer finishes, due to a change in GDM which is not yet picked up by other components of the distribution.
* We have switched the partitioning tool in the desktop installer to another implementation. The user interface of the manual partitioning tool is not finished, but we would very much like to receive bugs about crashes and other, non-user interface related problems.
If the new partitioner does not work for you, you can use the old partitioner by opening a terminal and running "ubiquity --old-partitioner".
If you are interested in following changes as we further develop Feisty, have a look at the feisty-changes list:
http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/feisty-changes
We also suggest that you subscribe to the ubuntu-devel-announce list if you are interested in following Ubuntu development. This is a low-traffic list (a few posts a week) carrying announcements of alpha releases, policy changes, approved specifications and other interesting events.
http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-announce
The Testing area of the wiki suggests various tests that can be performed on Herd CD releases to try to catch bugs early in the release process that they can be fixed:
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing
Bug reports should go to the Ubuntu bugtracker, Malone:
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bugs