Upon first powering on the Mini-Note the user is greeted with the standard SUSE Linux setup process. This system is extremely in-depth and allows some quite complex customisation straight off the bat, however it may seem a little daunting for less technical users.

In the corporate world that the Mini-Note is supposed to thrive this is more than likely a non-issue, as a company’s IT department will be responsible for the system setup. This is a process that takes 10 minutes, and while that’s not a long time in the grand scheme of things the process does require a large amount of user interaction. It would’ve been nice to have seen a more Windows-esque system, with a simple username and locale setup and a simple network detection tool.

The first boot after setup completes greets the user with the standard SUSE-flavoured Gnome desktop (pictured above). Unlike many of the netbooks currently on the market, the Mini-Note provdes a full desktop user experience, with the “start menu”, taskbar, and system tray positioned in a way that will feel very natural to Windows users. The excellent 10″ 1280×768 screen helps a lot in this respect.

Also included, as we can see above, is Novell’s SLAB menu replacement. As a huge fan of this in their OpenSUSE distribution, I was very happy to see it appearing in the business-oriented SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Also included is Novell’s own Control Center, which is the OS’s Control Panel equivalent, and provides the in-depth customisation options that Linux has become well-known for. That said, the default settings will be absolutely fine for 90% of users.

The Nautilus file manager is as good as ever, with a powerful, yet easy to use interface, and good previewing tools. In the gallery below you can see screenshots of the default SLAB, the Control Center, and the Nautilus File Manager.

Finally, I should mention the machine’s wireless capabilities – such an important aspect for such a portable machine. I was extremely impressed with the wireless performance of the Mini-Note, as it detects and connects to all of the wireless networks that I’ve tried with ease. Gnome’s Network Manager tool is very powerful, allowing management of wired and wireless networks, as well as allowing the user to save profiles for each of the networks that they regularly use.

One small complaint about Network Manager‘s wireless capability is a lack of autodetection for encryption settings, meaning that the user needs to know the type of encryption that the network that they are connecting to is actually using. While this is a common annoyance with all Gnome-based systems, it would’ve been nice to have seen Novell turn their attention to this area in SLED, as they have in so many other areas of the Linux desktop experience.

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