I'd like to point out that VL 5.8 is more than two years old. We no longer have volunteer packagers running it so no new security updates are being built. VL 5.8 is full of known security vulnerabilities that remain unpatched. I would recommend upgrading to a newer release at your earliest convenience.
I am aware of issues with 5.8, and I don't mean to be snippy or give any offense, but I have nearly 40 PRODUCTION machines configured for a specific application, and the work to customize, tweek, and install extra software for our purpose has taken well over 3 years, and the work continues to this day.
I have *TRED* upgrades to both 5.9, and 6.0, and to be perfectly frank, they are dead-dog slow on the hardware we're using to the point that simply running a browser is downright painful. 5.9 seems to have potential, but by the time I have everything tuned and installed, I'll be right where I am today with 5.9 'obsolete'. Yes, I'm also aware of Vector's 'lite' versions and have experimented with them, but our application needs lockdown ability of the XFCE kiosk envoronment, and can't use one of the other more obtuse window managers. Basically, for us, 5.8 does all it needs to do, and does it very well indeed. Until a similarly lightweight distro (which is what Vector is all about) appears, or somebody comes up with 40 easily portable, all-in-one machines that can withstand lots of traveling at an affordable price, 5.8 will remain in place.
I would also happily try to submit 5.8 packages of upgraded bits, or new non-packaged applications that I've compiled and installed, but most of our local installs are narrowly targed at our hardware (K6-2 CPUs) and custom stripped-down kernel in order to wring out what speed can be obtained. I recently built a bog-standard 5.8 boot partition on a development machine with the idea of creating 5.8 packages, since I would very much like to continue to support the Vector community. However, that effort was sidetracked trying to get 6.0 to work before it became extremely obvious that the newer stuff is just too bloated and slow for us.
I have, and continue to stress, that not everyone has the luxury of just tossing out older machines simply in order to upgrade to the latest/greatest software. One need only look to the Vista fiasco to see how bad things can be when the OS producers just *assume* you'll just switch.
Vector's legacy has always been lean/mean/and fast, though I acknowledge that the GNOME and other desktop worlds are seemingly blindly going for bloat rather than the snappy performance which has traditionally been Linux's forte. Much is what has happened in this regard is clearly *NOT* the fault or conscous decision of Vector folks.
But I would respectfully suggest that, perhaps most importantly, the smaller distro folks take note WHY their offerings are chosen. In many cases it's because of the fact that not everyone needs, wants, or can even USE the more popular distros. I've tried Xubuntu, for example, and it faces the same bloat/slowness issues of Vector 6, in fact, it's seeminly worse.
