ActiveState has released the first beta of ActivePerl 5.6, including all of the features planned for perl 5.6, plus Windows-only features like Unicode system calls, Windows Installer (just in time for Windows 2000!), and fork() emulation.
Windows 95 and 98 are not supported in this release. However, two new platforms are supported. ActivePerl 5.6 comes in binary form for Linux for x86 (packages for Red Hat 6.0 and Debian 2.1) and Solaris for SPARC 2.6. All versions of ActivePerl 5.6 include Perl Package Manager support.
