More on SLED 10 RC3

I'm doing some more work with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 RC3 today. I wanted to test a few things in particular:

• Plug & play recognition of USB flash drives
• Plug & play recognition of a USB three-button wheelmouse
  
• How well it handled audio files, specifically in the Helix Banshee MP3 player
• Evolution's ability to connect to my employer's WebDAV-enabled Exchange server

The first two items work great. I connected the Logitech wheelmouse I use with my iBook to the Dell and everything just works. Likewise, after I inserted my SanDisk Cruzer Mini 1GB flash drive, it was automatically mounted on the Helix Gnome desktop and a file manager window opened, showing the contents of the drive. One thing I'd like to see changed would be instead of having to right-click on the desktop icon and selecting "unmount" before removing the drive, would be to change the terminology to "eject." This would be more intuitive to the Windows users who Novell is targetting as potential customers. Another good option would be to enable unmounting the flash drive by dragging its icon to the desktop trash can, a la Mac OS.

It took a little bit of futzing around to get Helix Banshee to play MP3s. I copied a few MP3s from my iBook to the SanDisk flash drive, connected it to the Dell, then tried to import the files into HB directly from the flash drive. No go. It seemed to import the files but they wouldn't play until I first manually copied them to the Dell's hard disk, then import them. This needs to be made a bit more seamless.

I couldn't get Evolution to work with my Exchange server. When I tried to authenticate after entering in my account info, I got the error referenced here. The solution recommended is fine and dandy, but the odds of our Exchange admins adding BPROPFIND to the server's URL scan config is basically nil. Since the way that Evolution is going to make its way into many enterprises (if at all) is via a back door, the Evolution developers need to add the SEARCH method of WebDAV connectivity to Evo's capabilities.

It'll be interesting to see how SLED develops and how well it's received in the enterprise.