I installed it on my 1.3 GHz Celeron from a CD I burned. GUI install worked flawlessly. It seemed slower than usual but I didn't time it, so I could be totally wrong. I skipped the bootloader section of the installation because I like to install LILO on a floppy disk and that's not an option. All my hardware was identified without problems. VASM set up the xorg radeon driver, which is correct for the Radeon 9200, and I got 1280x1024 without any intervention except for selecting that resolution when presented with choices. startx did not work but startxfce4 does.
My biggest annoyance is that VASM does not keep its window size after I do an operation but before I close VASM. Default fonts on all VectorLinuxes (and Windows) are much too small for my aging eyes and I make them larger, which often causes various dialogs and windows not to work as designed. So I'm constantly resizing the VASM window after I do anything.
I tried to run LILO through VASM and got a "Cannot find kernel (vmlinuz). Aborting LILO install." So I have to use the CD to boot to VL7.
All programs I've tried are doing well so far. I've had an audio stream running in XMMS for several hours. Flash is working in Firefox but in Opera it tells me I need to install the Flash plugin. I've installed Tuxcards, SoftMaker Office, Adobe Reader, RealPlayer, Picasa, and CheckBook Tracker. A needed library was missing for Tuxcards--it was in the /usr/lib/qt3.something directory on my VL6 SOHO partition and is a qt3 library. I simply copied it into /usr/lib on VL7, did ldconfig, and tuxcards is now running. I cannot do without Tuxcards! CBTracker needed the same library it always does. I just copy it from my previous VL installation. No problems or complaints from SoftMaker Office, Adobe Reader, and RealPlayer. I installed the latest Picasa for Linux (they say they aren't going to continue developing Picasa for Linux). However, the Linux version is lacking important features of the Windows version, such as the excellent face recognition, so I always install the Windows version BUT KEEPING THE LINUX VERSION OF WINE INSTALLED BY PICASA FOR LINUX. It's a little too involved to go into a description of how I do it here. The trouble with simply installing Wine and then installing picasa36-setup.exe through Wine is that Picasa is badly behaved and grabs 100% of the CPU and doesn't clean up after itself, so when you exit Picasa many associated processes are still running and taking up too many resources. This does not happen with Picasa for Linux. So you really need to keep Picasa for Linux's wine and setup (in /opt) BUT replace the actual Picasa files with those from the Windows version running under straight Wine. Too complicated to go into here, but if anyone is interested, I can describe the procedure in another topic. Google tweaked Wine for Picasa for Linux and it apparently needs it.
I set up my local nfs network but haven't tested it, as I don't have another computer running right now. I haven't installed any printers yet.
This computer has always been very Linux friendly and it's getting along fine with Alpha 1. I think VL7 is doing remarkably well for an alpha 1 version. I probably won't do a lot more with VL7 except install my printers and make sure the basics I run are working, as I have very little time right now.
--GrannyGeek