Hi,
the new beta is great, but I have one request - if you won't build an SMP kernel, then _please_ enable support for IO-APICs on uniprocessors(kernel config items CONFIG_X86_UP_IOAPIC and CONFIG_X86_UP_APIC).
This way I can at least get Astaro running on my SMP machine, though admittedly not utilizing the second processor. (In this case it doesn't matter, since the box is SMP-ready but only contains one processor)
This also doesn't stop Astaro from working on some uniprocessor boxes, as compiling an SMP kernel might.
/fnord