I installed it today on my laptop, which had a very hard time with Beta 1. Good news and bad news.
First, the good news. I was able to get a successful installation using the sata kernel. That is, I had to type
sata
at the first prompt after the CD boots. First I had tried with the default kernel, but the installation halted after the first "floppy 0" line and required turning off the power switch. So I tried "sata" and that went all the way through without incident.
I did not install a boot loader and am using the CD to boot into the installation. I use the
sata root=/dev/hda6 ro
command to boot. In contrast to Beta 1, I did have modules in lsmod. I had no modules in lsmod with Beta 1. However, some were missing that I thought should be there, so I'm still not sure that things are working right. I did install the proprietary nVidia driver, which seems to have worked properly. Startx brought up the nVidia screen and then XFce, which looked good and at 1280x800 (though I haven't confirmed that yet).
Now the bad news:
* No sound comes out of the speakers. No sound has ever come out of the speakers, whether on VectorLinux 5.8 or 5.9 installed in a Linux partition or from one of the many LiveCDs I've tried. So that problem remains. It's obviously not VL's problem.
* I tried to get my wireless working. When I got to the
modprobe ndiswrapper
part, I got "ndiswrapper not found". When I ran
ndiswrapper -l
the only driver listed was the rtl8185 that I had just installed. Nothing else. So something seems amiss with ndiswrapper. Also, when I did ifconfig before I started working on the wireless, I got no eth0, which is odd because there is an Ethernet chip in the laptop and it works well with Linux. I would expect to see forcedeth in lsmod, but there was nothing there. It should have been added automatically.
So, without a network I can't go much farther. Pity.
--GrannyGeek