So you just got an HP Mini-Note 2133 pre-loaded with SLED 10?  Great, right?

Well…  It’s not been so great for a lot of people.  It seems that HP simply put this laptop together, half-assed a SLED load and sent it out into the wild.  I’ve had a ton of problems with it, the two major ones being that I couldn’t register the machine with the Novell Customer Center (not even with my site license) it ships with a non-working wireless card.

My wifi fix was simple, buy a new usb wifi dongle…  Registration, however, was a little easier to fix (after some wailing, gnashing of teeth, and chat in #opensuse-GNOME… thanks captiain_magnus!).

If you attempt to use YaST to register you copy of SLED on the 2133, you’ll be re-directed to a “special” Novell Customer Center login.  It’s a little different than the normal one in that it wants an HP license, not any other SLED license you may have.  The biggest difference, however, is that it’s broke.  It simply refreshes the page when you click submit and sends nothing to Novell.

They’re pretty sneaky about hiding your license number as well.  It happens to be on your restore DVD.  It’s located on the right hand side below the HP logo and the “2133” text.  It’s in a series something like NNNNNN-XNN, where N’s are numbers and X is some letter.

To get around the registration bug, have your license number handy and fire up your terminal.  Use ‘sudo’ or just ‘su to root and issue the following command:

suse_register -n -a serial-hp=NNNNNN-XNN

Where “NNNNNN-XNN” is your registration code.  Sit back and wait, it took almost 20 minutes for this command to finish for me and you’ll receive absolutely no indication that it’s functioning.  Once it’s done, you’ll simply be returned to your prompt.  Fire up YaST or your favorite terminal emulator and check your repositories.  You should now have a Novell repository added.

Enjoy!