1. Found a strange bug with trying to use alsamixer I had to install pulseaudio for the system to work properly.
My advice on the new version is not to have Pulse audio and just use Alsa as I always have problems with it. It is a buggy mess.
2. Base on Debian or Debian Mint - get foundation stable. Icewm desktop seems ok. No real problems with that I find Icewm more configurable than LXDE.
3. I tidied up the Sources list for Apt by not having the deb opera and the download virtualbox enabled repos.
4. Updated to latest Iceape from Sid by downloading from here
http://packages.debian.org/sid/iceape and install with the excellent Gdebi it handled any dependencies.
5. Overall impressions not terrible but solid with problems ironed out and still useful as older kernel works well on this machine.
6. Just update what you need to update, I'm finding this so far quite a good workhorse.
7. What surprised me most on this Sempron is that flash 11 worked.
8. Anyway hope there is another release sometime.