After many Alpha releases, the Vectorlinux developement team gladly announces the first public beta release of the Vectorlinux 5.8 SOHO. This beta release , built on the rock solid base of Slackware and VL 5.8 standard base, includes a custom 2.6.20 SMP Kernel, compiled wih bootsplash, squashfs,lzma, and realtime patches. It includes KDE version 3.5.6 with Kmyfirewall, Amarok 1.4.5, Open Office version 2.1. Other multimedia such as VLC 0.8.6a, Mplayer 1.0RC1. Graphics editors such as The Gimp version 2.2.13. Also sporting a new look and feel, from the boot menu to the desktop.Many other great features have been added.