Just installed Beta 3. Seems a little snappier in response time overall. A few persistent issues:
When going to System Settings and choosing Appearance, and then Fonts, and from there choosing to change the font for the desktop icons, there are a great many useless entries appearing in the font selection drop down menu. They all end with the file extension .pcf. I will point out that there are some valid font entries, and they apply ok, but what are all of the .pcf files? Also I am not seeing a lot of the common fonts. Arial, for instance.
Text installer still kernel panics and does not work. Graphical installer works ok. My concern is that I am constantly modifying and rewriting my lilo.config file as I add and delete partitions and experiment with new distros. I can do it by hand with a text editor, or use the repair LILO option from my VL6 Gold of Classic cds, however I like the way that the SOHO graphical installer does it. Could there be an option added within the graphical installer just for repairing/reinstalling LILO?
Gparted does not execute correctly when installed from the repos via Gslapt. (043 version from the xapps directory) After installing it, the menu launcher entry (under System) does absolutely nothing, even after a reboot. Clicking on the gparted.desktop entry in usr/share/applications results in the following error: KdeInit could not launch 'gksu'..Could not find 'gksu' executable.
This can be fixed by editing the menu and the gparted.desktop to point to usr/sbin/gpartedbin
HOWEVER, the default commands are pointing to gksu /usr/sbin/gparted %f. That command gets you the above mentioned error. Also, ntfsprogs should be installed to give gparted support for ntfs formatted partitions. I know it can be gotten from the repos, but why not install it in the first place so that it is compiled in the VL6 iso? Also need to get gparted 045 in the repos. (might be under testing; didn't check)
Adobe flash is rather old. 10.0 r32 is what is installed in SOHO Beta 3. There have been at least 3 upgrades since. Just a matter of time before certain apps will not work with an older version of flash. As it now stands, one has to obtain the libflashplayer.so file from the newer version and manually plant it in the usr/lib/mozilla/plugins directory. Not something a newcomer to Linux is going to figure out anytime soon.
Firefox still asks what to do with PDF files. You have to manually tell it to use Okular. Not sure how Firefox is compiled in VL, but in Puppy derivatives, you can specify Application preferences, and the preferences will persist when you do a remaster. Something like this needs to be done in VL as well.
Overall no installation problems, just the above mentioned issues that require inside know how to resolve. Not something Window$ converts are going to be able to do.