This version comes on 2 CDs. I was unable to find the checksums for them, but luckily the downloads seem to have been successful. As with the Standard edition, I had to install twice. This time it was because the text-based installer ‘lost’ the CD it had just been loaded from, and had a kernel panic. The GUI installer worked perfectly, however, and each step was generally obvious, except where it asked about mount-points; presumably, they expect the user to have read the excellent on-line manual!

The SOHO version differs from the Standard in both the quantity and choice of software, although there is still the extensive duplication: 4 web-browsers, 2 email clients, 4 video-players, even 2 office suites. It also seems odd to choose games and educational software over accounting in a version aimed at office use. All the software tested performed well. As one would expect with KDE, it’s big: Firefox and Openoffice took 933MB including caching and buffers.

The only problems were that GUI programs would not run in the terminal emulator as root, and I could not paste from a GUI editor into a CLI one. It would have been nice if there were a GUI tool for mounting partitions.

If you have previous experience of Linux and you like KDE, then Vector is worth a look, if not quite up to the standard of Mepis.