I've been running VL 4.0 SOHO (Small Office/Home Office). This is a great distro for a desktop computer, as it has Xine, XMMS, OpenOffice, etc already installed. It is still rc1, but rc2 is expected to come out soon.

I've been running it for more than a month now, and since I've installed it it has been more stable than windows xp (for me). Its working way better than Red Hat of Fedora ever did for me in the stability department (its based on Slackware)...though I would recommend Fedora to new users, until they learn some of the basics...and also if you need server type stuff.

Also, the performance of this distro is great, I can run many games better in VL than in Windows now!

Hi,
Have you tried Mandrake? It's worked best for me since it is easy to use but adds in all the features that you'd like from linux.
-R

I tried Mandrake a long time ago, but it just isn't what I'm looking for. If I wasn't afraid of the installation process for Slackware, thats probably what I'd try next. I want stability and speed. Mandrake and Red hat/fedora are in the same type of category for me, intended more for beginners..though they are still linux so they can still be adapted to suit anyones needs. VL SOHO gives what many people use most, and cut out the rest so that the distro fits on one cd. This makes it a very simple install, and also makes it so not too many useless programs get installed, that waste precious resources. I think VL would suit a lot peoples initial needs, and after that you can pick and chose the software YOU want, and only what you want. I found with RH I was only using software that had pre-made packages...because many other programs didn't like to compile on my RH system (NOTE: I still consider Fedora and RH to be the same thing...though they are different).

VL is not a replacement for the classic distros, just an alternative that should be taken seriously.

Hmm, I'm kind of interested in this distro now. Do you have a link for it? And what kind of games have you managed to play on it? I've tried Gentoo, but it refused to recognize some of my hardware. I tried Fedora Core 2, but that crashed almost immediately. Mandrake seems to work well and I've started to figure out a lot of its quirks (PCMCIA config on Mandrake 10 is a pain!) so I'm starting to like it. But I'm always open to new ideas!

http://www.vectorlinux.com/forum/
See you there.

Hmm. I ordered an official CD set from Vector back in January and, despite a bundle of chaser emails, have never received it. Whether this is typical or not, I can't say, but I hasn't really given me a great impression.

When my VL disks failed to turn up, I bought an official Slackware 9.1 set instead. As someone who considers himself a novice still, I found the installation to be very straightforward, though I have to say Slack didn't work for me out of the box. It's very much a project distro - something to get your hands dirty with, which is just fine by me.

Yeah...
That's one point , that irks me as well : The way Darrel mishandled the orders of the "DeLuxe-CD". I have my own , not-too-friendly thoughts about his attitude in this regard.
Efforts are being made to shape up in this field ; There's now a distributor for the USA(and I believe Canada as well , not sure): PastorEd.
European distribution is in the hands of Webmouse.
You could try to contact one of them.

Asia , Africa , S-America and Australia I'm not sure about.

Have you posted on the official VL forum? The people in charge of VL put a certain amount of time browsing the forum each week, and they will get you your CD's. PastorEd is a very friendly guy from what I've seen.

Make that "every day" ; would be more accurate. Most of us "Inner Circle Vectorians" nearly live there....
I , for example , scan the VL-board several times a day. Part of the (unpaid) job of board-admin so to say...

Where can we buy their CD?

I downloaded VL4.0 iso, burned a CD, and installed yesterday. Everything went fine until I got to the point after installing the GUI package and was working through the hardware configuration. Then my machine rebooted itself. After it rebooted, I was able to login as root, establish a password, and create a user. Then my machine rebooted. I get about two minutes of time and then the machine reboots. I like what I've seen thus far, but I'm not sure how much work I can get done with the machine rebooting every two minutes and I'd like to get the Linux working.

Also tried Debian (minimal install) before VL with no reboot problems.

I started with a PC cobbled together from old PC's.

- Celeron 600MHz
- 190MB RAM
- hda is 8GB with 512MB swap partition, 1GB root partition, and three 2GB Linux partitions
- hdb is 6GB with two Linux partitions
- both drives were used with a different OS (one a 1995 version and one a 1998 version)
and were reformatted from DOS before being partitioned for the Linux install

What did I do wrong? What can I do (within two minutes if possible) to fix it?

Any help would be appreciated.

I downloaded VL4.0 iso, burned a CD, and installed yesterday. Everything went fine until I got to the point after installing the GUI package and was working through the hardware configuration. Then my machine rebooted itself. After it rebooted, I was able to login as root, establish a password, and create a user. Then my machine rebooted. I get about two minutes of time and then the machine reboots. I like what I've seen thus far, but I'm not sure how much work I can get done with the machine rebooting every two minutes and I'd like to get the Linux working.

Also tried Debian (minimal install) before VL with no reboot problems.

I started with a PC cobbled together from old PC's.

- Celeron 600MHz
- 190MB RAM
- hda is 8GB with 512MB swap partition, 1GB root partition, and three 2GB Linux partitions
- hdb is 6GB with two Linux partitions
- both drives were used with a different OS (one a 1995 version and one a 1998 version)
and were reformatted from DOS before being partitioned for the Linux install

What did I do wrong? What can I do (within two minutes if possible) to fix it?

Any help would be appreciated.

I don't really know what in the software could cause that, other than a bad file...but it could be hardware related too. Maybe the CPU is over heating. I'm guessing that isn't super helpful.

Other than that, I recommend you start a new thread for that problem in the General Forum maybe....or even just in the Vector Linux forum...but you'd get more help in the General forum.

Good luck.

Indeed, it, but eventhough vector is fast, it isn't that much faster then slack. It is slimmed just too much as well, this results in many
dependency problems you don't have on Slackware. Vector is great 'as it is', but once you try to install things on it, it often becomes quite a pain.