Ubuntu 7.04 Herd 2 has been released:

Welcome to Feisty Fawn Herd 2, which will in time become Ubuntu 7.04.

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 2 is the second 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, Edubuntu and Xubuntu respectively:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/feisty/herd-2/ (Ubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/feisty/herd-2/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/feisty/herd-2/ (Edubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/feisty/herd-2/ (Edubuntu)

See http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Archive for access instructions.

The primary focus during the time from Herd 1 have been the re-merging of changes from Debian and inclusion of new versions of applications. Notably, we have upgraded the kernel to 2.6.20.

Please refer to http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/herd2 for information on changes in Ubuntu, and https://wiki.kubuntu.org/FeistyFawn/Herd2/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 don't need to bother reporting these if you encounter them):

* The alternate i386 install CD takes a very long time (about five minutes) to do hardware detection on some machines. During that period, the installer will look like it has hung or blue-screened.

* The desktop installer sometimes mounts the newly partitioned hard drive and then fails. If this happens, unmount the disk by right-clicking it and choosing "Unmount" and then restart the installation process.

If you're 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're 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