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SuSE

The guys from Novell/SuSE dont include RapidSVN with their distributions. One of the unofficial sources is:

        * http://packman.links2linux.de/package/rapidsvn

The real thing that annoys me about opensuse is that certain parts come deliberately crippled (like getting a xine engine that won't play mp3's) and no visible instructions on how to un-cripple.

Yeah - they don't provide certain packages, such as the MP3 stuff, to avoid potential legal problems. There is a simple way to fix it though - add a Packman repository to your list of sources in YaST, and update/install whatever you need. Here's one location:

http://packman.iu-bremen.de/suse/10.2/

After you've added it, start the software manager and add/update "lame" and "xine-lib". It will automatically add any other libraries you need, except for libdvdcss (required for watching DVDs) - the RPM package that Packman has does not contain the source, but the site does give you some tips about how to get it and build the package; it's not difficult.

Another tip: set the filter to "Installation Summary", check all the boxes except "Do not install", then click the menu item Packages->All in This List->Update if newer version available. That will mark the newer Packman versions for installation over the original SuSE versions. Uncheck "Keep" and "Protected" to see a list of which packages it wants to change before clicking "Accept". There will probably be quite a few, so you may not want to do them all at once.

-- Steve

YaST is precisely one of the reasons SuSE has not been more commercial. As pretty as it is, it's really an undocumented collection of insonsistently written interfaces under the hood, and it breaks things very badly. For example, its chroot handling for BIND and DHCP is a bad joke: you do not intermingle the contents of a chroot tree with the directory it's copying the files from, and you do not make the system files symlinks *out* of a chroot tree. You move the files and make the symlinks *into* the tree. The autoyast tool can't look at update locations and base repositories at the same time, so solving dependencies for new features can accidentally revert core packages and break your system.

The insistence on re-arraning configuration files in ways that software authors never dreamed of makes the systems unstable if you try to upgrade to a new version of the software, such as the insistence of filling the kernel SRPM's with tarballs of bundled patches instead and managing those with a shell script run by the .SPEC file, instead of actually putting them in the .SPEC file and as separate patches like any sane system. Their factoring of their packages is very bad, and the cutesy little tricks they play with their SRPM's making them rely on packages that are not part of the distribution but exist only in their build environment make development quite hard. Coupled with the fact that autoyast demands a user at the console to do updates, and you get the sorts of reasons I got a 500 machine site to throw it the heck out and switch directly to CentOS.

And don't get me started on the NVidia driver craziness: do *not* weld shell-script installed packages into an RPM manager, because they're distinct beasts and will step on each other.

YaST is where Linuxconf from RedHat was 4 years ago: you many notice that RedHat dumped it and now makes smaller, more modular, and consistently good configuration tools that are much smaller and easier to modify for new features. If you need to admin a SuSE box, install http://www.webmin.com/ and http://fou4s.gaugusch.at/ for package management and you'll have a much more usable system. If you want more up-to-date or non-DRM crippled tools, go to http://packman.links2linux.de/.

YaST is the absolutely worst part of SuSE, but Novell is lauding it as one of their key features? YaST gets just about everything wrong: handling chroot cages with symlinks *OUT* of the chroot cage instead of *INTO* the chroot cage, an insistence on wrapping vendor software packages in badly written install scripts that are wildly inconsistent with the underlying RPM package management, the world's most complex and least organized auto-install system, and overfriendly GUI's that refuse to let you manage more than two kernels on one machine and overwrite your hand-edits? And that YaST package management and update system that doesn't have the concept of handling both an update and base OS package site, or allow unattended operation for cron scripts or kickstart installs? Novell should take the money they overpay the YaST team and give it to the author of fou4s, which actually works, and the http://packman.links2linux.de/ website which actually keeps packages like Mplayer up-to-date and compiled with all the options, instead of forcing you to recompile packages to actually contain all the available features built into the SRPM. And especially they should take the money away from their kernel team, who couldn't publish a working SRPM if their lives depended on it because they have this custom "build system" that actually prevents the SRPM's from being compilable without hand-editing.

They also pretend that their freely downladable versions of things are the same as their commercially published ones. Roughly half the packages are different: if you use the commercial installations, you cannot use the free mirror sites for package installations due to the YaST stupidities I mentioned and their inconsistent release numbers. This is why even if you buy SuSE licenses, you should always install from the free download sites, to keep good access to updates and consistent OS numbering with them.

Well, i'm running SUSE 9.3 Pro (Retail), and MPlayer plays anything you can trow at it.

Compile MPlayer yourself if you want to get best results, if you don't want or care to compile download the following packages from:

http://packman.links2linux.de/?action=index
MPlayer
w32codecs
Lame
lzo

If compiling, don't forget to install gtk-devel package (Gtk1 not Gtk2), and configure with the following options: ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-gui --with-codecsdir=/usr/lib/win32

The download the All codecs package from MPlayer page, uncompress and copy them to /usr/lib/win32

Download the default skin from MPlayer page and uncompress it on /usr/share/mplayer/Skin

Run gmplayer and you have mplayer with GUI which will play practically anything. You can also download kplayer which is a KDE based GUI on top of MPlayer:

http://kplayer.sourceforge.net/

There, more than enough to get you going. One more thing, use the alsa plugin for sound.

It's funny you should bring that I up. I just solved the same problem last week on my 9.3

This link below solved almost all of my problems. Go to the multimedia section and pick out the codecs.
http://packman.links2linux.de/

In the libraries section look for the Win32-Codecs

The only thing I'm still frustrated is the Python libraries, and .asx audio streams. I can't get iPodder to work with it. I had the same problem with Fedora Core as well.

Hope this helps!

SuSE: Now we need a new thing to complain about SuSE.

The best candidate would probably be the lack of a working video playing setup on the install CDs/DVD.

Downloading and installing the missing packages off the packman site works, though, so shrug.