I've been happily using SL4 on my laptop for a while now and I'd like to 
thank all those responsible for the distribution for keeping things 
painless. I do however have a few (somewhat minor) issues I haven't been 
able to figure out. It would be helpful if someone knows workarounds.

1. I had some issues with getting the install disc (and OS after 
installation) to boot with it scanning the USB ports. So, I just tacked 
on a 'nousb' to my grub.conf and all has been well. Occasionally, I do 
need to use a USB device or two (headphone/microphone, mouse, external 
hard drive...) and for those sessions, I modify grub on booting to allow 
USB. The cool part here is this works flawlessly, as in I plug a hard 
disk in for instance, and on boot up, it shows up on my desktop as an 
icon. The annoyance here, however, is if I remove nousb and boot without 
a USB device plugged in, it hangs on boot. I am assuming it's stalling 
while looking for something that isn't there.

Again, this is just an annoyance. All I do now is to make sure I know 
what (if) devices I plan to use and boot with or without nousb as is 
appropriate. Is there some way I can get it to both scan for devices, 
and not die while trying at the same time? I've tried enabling/disabling 
legacy USB support in the BIOS.

2. The little gnome power monitor thing seems to only read the battery's 
state on boot up, and not refresh itself during the time the machine is 
up. For instance, if I start the machine low on power and not connected 
to AC, the display will perpetually show low power, even if I later 
plugged it into the power and I know the battery is near full charge.

Is there something that can be done to force it to read battery data 
more often?

3. And finally, I like using 'locate'. I don't, however, enjoy 
'updatedb' trashing my hard drive as it indexes things so often. Since 
this machine is often turned off and turned on, I don't, for instance, 
want things like updatedb to be run every day, just every once in a 
day's worth of uptime. Could someone point me to a resource to move 
these sorts of tasks to an 'anacron' list rather than a 'cron' job list?

Thanks,
Harish