Excellent work guys! This alpha works a treat! Apart from requiring a reinstallation after deciding to try upgrading the kernel (resulting in my laptop restarting every time after a successful BIOS check), I have yet to encounter any issues.
It seems I've solved my own problem, and I thought I'd share the solution (kindly supplied by silenc3r here - http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=95848). On the LXDE edition of Salix 13.1, my laptop wasn't able to detect the blank CD-R I inserted (i.e. no desktop icon, nothing in /mnt ...