SLED comes with a number of productivity tools as a standard part of the distribution.

OpenOffice.org 2.3 Novell Edition is one of the key tools along with the rest of the Open Office Suite. Browsing the Internet is a pleasant experience with the installed Firefox version 2.0.0.13. Updating to SLED SP2 installed Firefox version 2.0.0.14.

Evolution takes care of the Personal Information Management (PIM) duties of e-mail, contacts, calendaring and tasks quite nicely. Configuring Evolution to work with Google Mail was a snap. Once that's done you have a very capable e-mail tool you can carry around with you (see Figure 1). Importing contacts from an external VCF file takes no more than three mouse clicks.

One of the annoying things about some of the pre-installed tools is the configuration process. For example, the first time you start Evolution you must enter information on a number of dialogs that exceed the screen real estate at 800X600 on the Mini-Note. While it isn't impossible to get past the screens, it does require a little mouse movement to get to all the text boxes and "Next" buttons.

Software updates must be enabled before they will work. This requires you to go to Open Administrator Settings from the Control Panel and go through the Novell Customer Center Configuration process. Once this is complete you will have access to the main software update repositories, and the automatic notifier should work.

After these actions I was able to update the Mini-Note to SLED SP2. There were a few dependency issues that popped up during the update process (see Figure 2). I chose to ignore the conflicts where I could, and the update seemed to finish without any issues. Rebooting the system was required and after that I was presented with pretty much the same user interface as before.

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