It is my great pleasure to announce the availability of DesktopBSD 1.6 final. This release is the first stable release of the 1.6 branch and comes with a great number of new features and improvements. It is based on the second release candidate of FreeBSD's upcoming production release 6.3 and provides the user with an enhanced KDE 3.5.8 desktop environment.

The most notable new features are:

• FreeBSD 6 as a modern and reliable base system
• X.Org release 7.3, improving support for modern graphics hardware
• Live CD/DVD feature for testing the system without installation to a hard-drive
• Revised installer supporting upgrades from 1.0 and previous 1.6 release candidates
• Improved package manager usability and performance
• Many enhancements and bugfixes for the DesktopBSD tools
• Support for multiple processors and multi-core CPUs
• Inclusion of the NVIDIA graphics driver for hardware 3D rendering
• DesktopBSD build servers as an up-to-date source for precompiled packages

Please read the release notes for more information.

ISO images for the 32-bit DVD (i386), 64-bit CD (amd64) and 32-bit CD (i386-CD) are available. An add-on CD with language packages for the 32-bit CD is also provided (not required with the DVD). The files can be obtained from our download page.