SLED 11 on HP Mini is awesome! Thank you Novell!

After 2 months of my newly won HP Mini 2140 (courtesy of Novell) being in limbo, I got my hot-little-hands on it Friday.  It had been shipped to CPR (my employer 2 jobs ago) and the good folks there hung on to it for me.  (The same could not be said of my employer that came after them.)  Not only did I get to pick up my toy, I got to visit with some former colleagues that I genuinely enjoyed working with.

I got it back to work, powered it up, and was pleasantly surprised to see this happy green screen after boot up:

I'd been hoping for Moblin, but was overjoyed to see that SLED 11 had been pre-loaded with all sorts of cool toys.  Better yet, I LOVE!! the keyboard.  And I'm really picky about keyboards, being a touch typist.  Which is why my Toshiba laptop gets hauled to work every day so I can write on that instead of my Dell laptop provided by work.   But now I'm thinking, leave the laptop at home and bring the mini with me instead.  And since all of my writing is done in OpenOffice anyway, it will transfer between the HP and the Toshiba just fine.  And, since I have 2 other minis (a Dell that I mooched and is now a dual-boot Win7 SE and Ubuntu NetBook Remix) I can make my other HP a dual-boot with Moblin to see how it looks vs. SLED.

And the outside case has a nice polished nickel look to it.

There is a known bug with regard to the wireless NIC...you have to keep entering your password if you're using any kind of protected wireless connection.  It has to do with CASA, which isn't actually installed on my mini, but seems to have an effect anyway.  Just reenter your password once, then select Deny and it will connect fine.  Odd, but it works.  Kind of reminds me of an old System/36 updater error that you could either pay IBM lots of money to tell you, "pick abort or skip and it will work just fine" or you could have done it my way which was to do try that anyway and see if any files were missing.  I saved Security Pacific National Bank (formerly absorbed into Crocker Bank, which was swallowed up by either BofA or Wells Fargo) quite a bit chunk of money.

And today I've learned that our old HEAT system (which I'm not fond of) can't handle running on my laptop if either GroupWise OR the VMWare client is loaded at the same time.  Apparently it's only my laptop with issues, which just figures.  The heathen always gets the weird stuff.  :)