You can now download and install the beta version 7 of FreeSurfer. See this page
https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/dev7beta1

The purpose of this beta is for users to install and run FreeSurfer on some of their data sets using their computers and their commands and their post-processing to help us track down any errors prior to the full release scheduled for mid March. To that end, we would like for you to do several tests on a couple of subjects:

Do not use the beta version for any analyses that you want to publish. Only use full releases.
Run recon-all on the various computers (desktops, clusters, etc) that you use
Run recon-all with any special flags that you might use (eg, expert options)
Edit the recon and verify that the changes are taken and preserved
Run recon-all on problem data sets
Run recon-all on hires data (just add -hires flag), where hires is voxel size less than 1mm
Run recon-all with T2 or FLAIR input (1mm or hires)
Run longitudinal recon-all
Run the subfield analysis (hippcampal subfields, amygdalar and thalamic nuclei). You can do this by just adding -subfields to recon-all
Run samseg on a data set. We'll have more docs on samseg later, but for now SAMSEG = Sequence Adaptive Multimodal Segmentation can take any modality (or combination) and produce a volume segmentation (seg.mgz, like the aseg.mgz) -- it does not replace recon-all (samseg does not create surfaces, only volumetric segmentation). You can run it with something like "samseg --i inputvolume.mgz --o samsegdir". It should take about 45min. For now, we just want to make sure that it runs on your system.
Run any special post-processing to make sure that nothing breaks.

We'll update the release notes with new features for the full release, but for now you should know that some features are not present in v7 (QDEC, GPU-capability, and recon-all -make). A new version of Tracula is in the works but probably will not be out until April or so; we'll have a minor release when it is ready.

Let us know how it goes!
The FreeSurfer Team