Just thought I'd let people know that I spaced out and didn't name the tarballs or directories "*-beta1" in my first upload. Also the initial dotlrn beta1 tarball was missing the survey portlet and applet (I've straightened out CVS with the proper versions now, so this shouldn't be a problem in the future.)
Download away and have fun! We'll be having beta2s for sure as there have already been a few bug fixes committed, but there won't be any major changes.