After much anticipation, the VectorLinux development team proudly announces the first public beta release of the VectorLinux 5.8 SOHO. This beta release, built on the rock solid base of VL 5.8 standard, includes a custom 2.6.20 SMP Kernel, compiled with bootsplash, squashfs, lzma, and realtime patches. It includes KDE version 3.5.6 with Kmyfirewall, Amarok 1.4.5, Open Office version 2.1. It also features many other multimedia applications such as VLC 0.8.6a, Mplayer 1.0RC1, and graphics editors such as The Gimp version 2.2.13 and Xara Xtreme version 0.7. It provides printing support with cups version 1.2.8, hpijs drivers for HP printers, and gutenprint drivers for many popular printers. It also sports a new look and feel, from the boot menu to the desktop. It supports reading and writing to NTFS-formatted media via fuse and ntfs-3g. Many other great features have been added to VL 5.8 SOHO.