Canonical's Didier Roche proudly announced the availability of the third Beta build of the upcoming and highly anticipated Ubuntu Snappy Core 16 operating system for PCs, embedded and IoT (Internet of Things) devices.

The first Beta images of Ubuntu Snappy Core 16 were released last month, as announced by Canonical's Michael Vogt for PCs, Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 computers. Three weeks later, we're now able to take the Beta 3 builds for a test drive, which brings quite a few interesting changes and under-the-hood improvements.

"The Snappy team is happy to announce the Feature Freeze of Ubuntu Core 16, which means all the major features planned for the stable series 16 image have landed, and the upcoming weeks will consist exclusively of stabilization and polishing," says Didier Roche, Ubuntu Core Developer and Technical Leader of the Ubuntu Desktop team.

Here's what's new in Ubuntu Snappy Core 16 Beta 3

New features included in this third Beta release of the Ubuntu Snappy Core 16 operating system include configuration support, a rich Snap hook (also known as callback) mechanism, better boot handling, the ability to register devices, as well as gadget support for cloud-init configurations.

Moreover, it comes with various assertion improvements, multiple improvements to console configuration, and unattended user setup support. Ubuntu Snappy Core 16 Beta 3 offers support for 64-bit (amd64) and 32-bit (i386) hardware architectures, as well as Raspberry Pi 2 single-board computers.

Support for Raspberry Pi 3 SBCs will be available shortly, along with images for Dragonboard 410c single-board computers. You can grab them right now from here, and use the command below in a terminal emulator to extract the .img file from the compressed archive. Happy testing!

xzcat ubuntu-core-16-amd64-beta3.img.xz > ubuntu-core-16-amd64-beta3.img