The two lowest priced Mini-Note models come with SuSE preloaded, but up until now there’s been no way to restore your system to factory settings. While HP has offered Windows Vista drivers since day one, and began offering Windows XP drivers recently, there was no Linux support section on the company’s web site until today.

This comes as good news for anyone who ordered one of the SuSE models, but might not be that familiar with Linux. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been experimenting with an unfamiliar Linux distribution when I mucked things up enough that the simplest solution seemed to be a fresh install.

This is good news for Linux enthusiasts too, since the disc image includes not just SuSE, but all of the drivers you need to get it to work properly with a Mini-Note. While you can install Ubuntu and other Linux distributions on a Mini-Note, not all of the features will work out of the box. You’ll typically have to spend some time tweaking your settings to get things like WiFi to work properly.

And while HP only offers SuSE on its low-end models right now, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t use this disc to install the open source operating system on one of the higher end machines with a 1.6GHz processor, integrated Bluetooth, and higher capacity battery. Now if HP would just offer SuSE as an option on every model so you didn’t have to pay the Windows tax on the top of the line units.

[via HP Mini Note PC]