I installed beta 2.1 on the system where I had previously installed beta2, which had problems getting 1280x1024 screen resolution until I installed the proprietary NVidia driver. I had more oddities on that system so I decided to install beta 2.1 to see if they were fixed.
I'm happy to say that most of the problems vanished with beta 2.1. I switched monitors with my other desktop and now have a 20" 1600x1200 lcd on this system. I used the AUTO (no xorg.conf) option at initial setup and it installed the nouveau driver, which correctly displayed 1600x1200 automatically. All other hardware was correctly identified. Nevertheless, I decided to install the proprietary NVidia driver because I get glxgears scores that are six times higher than those with the xorg driver--not that I do anything where that would make a difference.<g>
I haven't installed printers yet--that's my next task. I run a few Windows programs under Wine. I couldn't install wine through Gslapt, as it isn't where Gslapt says it is. I did find it at
ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/vectorlinux/veclinux-7.0/testing/ap/ , downloaded the package, and installed it with installpkg. It seems to be working fine--is there some reason the wine package is not where Gslapt thinks it is?
The scanner part of my Canon MP160 doesn't work right. It previews the scan but can't complete the actual scan. I researched the problem on the Web and it's widespread but nobody had a working solution. I'm about to install the proprietary Canon software for the scanner and hope I'll have better luck with that.
For me, beta 2.1 was a big improvement over beta 2. There are still quite a few error messages when starting various programs from a command line, but they don't seem to impact performance.
Opera has a new version (11.10), which I installed and am using without problems. The Flash version in beta 2.1 is not current. I installed the latest flash and it has worked so far in Opera, Firefox, and SeaMonkey. The SeaMonkey version has had two updates. I hope we can get the latest version in the next VL7 release.
I'm very happy with VL7 and am really looking forward to the final release, which I hope isn't too far away.
--GrannyGeek