The time has come! Our release engineers have been refining their automated builds of the minimal CD and stage3 tarballs, and the first builds are uploaded to our mirrors. Select your favorite mirror and navigate to the /experimental/ directory. Under the x86, amd64, ia64, alpha, and sparc64 architectures, the autobuilds directory contains stages. So far, minimal CD images are only available for x86 and amd64.

We're still working to add automated builds for ppc, ppc64 and hppa as well as CD images for architectures lacking them. We built the stage3 tarballs from the latest stable packages. Fresh builds will show up every week, although sometimes we might skip a week if build problems crop up.

Because these builds are automated, they have not been rigorously tested as the old releases. Occasionally, you might run into problems. If that happens, just try a file from a different week.

Please try out these new builds and leave your feedback on the forums. As always, please report any bugs on Bugzilla.

Happy holidays!

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Ben de Groot contributed the draft for this announcement.