I’m happy to announce AriOS 3.0 Beta is now available for download and testing.

AriOS 3.0 Beta is based on Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and comes with a carefully designed and customized GNOME 2 session that uses the elegant Avant Window Navigator as the main panel (without Unity).

Finding files and launching applications is handled by Synapse, the modern smart  semantic launcher for GNU/Linux systems.

A detailed and complete release announcement is in the making for the final release. For now these are a few of the packages you can find in AriOS (all at their latest versions as of May 27, 2011):

Linux Kernel 2.6.38-8

Firefox 4.0.1

VLC 1.1.9

Nautilus Elementary 2.32.2

LibreOffice 3.3.2

GIMP 2.6.11

Oracle Vm Virtualbox 4.0.8

Pidgin 2.7.11

Synapse 0.2.6

Banshee 2.0.0

Choqok Microblogging Cient 1.0

Shotwell 0.9.2

Gloobus Preview 0.4.5

Multimedia codecs

Adobe Flash Player 10.3

Tasque 0.1.9

Pinta 1.0

Grub Customizer 2.1.2

Gparted  0.7.0

and more.

Those who want to give AriOS a try before the final release can download the iso from:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/arios/files/3.0/x86/Iranian-Edition/Beta/

Please pay attention to the following points before you proceed to download:

• This is not the final release. I have tested it on a few machines and it’s fairly stable, however in terms of features and software it might be a bit different from the final release.
• It’s good practice not to install beta software on production machines.
• This is the beta version for the Iranian Edition of AriOS. However, everything (the installer, desktop, etc) is in English so everyone can give this a try. The only difference between the Iranian and International Editions is that the former comes with Persian as an alternate keyboard layout (not the default one) and some Persian TTF fonts. So the two editions are only slightly different.
• For maximum speed and minimum boot time burn the ISO on a USB stick instead of DVD. Use unetbootin for this purpose.
• Be kind enough to report bugs so that they can be fixed for the final release which will not be far away from now.

Any feedback, comments or suggestions will be highly appreciated!