Keep in mind that a live CD will run much more slowly than when the OS is installed on your hard drive.
It is not really fair to judge the 'speed' of an OS with the Live CD.
True, and I realize that its going to be slower from the CD, but it was reallllly slow. I installed the xfce version using a 10k rpm scsi drive. In case any other newbies are interested...
I didn't have the option to add the repository during installation, so I did that manually following this:
http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Self-install-existing
It didn't put any shortcuts on my desktop, so for the initial setup I just navigated to localhost:2000 myself.
The rest of the setup went fine, except that upon restarting my network manager would not autostart. Solved this following:
http://forums.amahi.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2529 where he mentions adding the DEVICE=eth0 line
Now everything works just fine! I turned off dhcp and setup VPN, now I just need some more hard drives to add to my storage.