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It's called apt. It's already widely deployed in Debian and Ubuntu, and has been for a long time. The problem is solved.

And for completness:

• on openSUSE it's "zypper".
• on some embed Linux distros it's "ipkg" and it's derivate (like opkg).

What proportion of third party vendors distribute their software using apt ?

There is :

• a great dealy of 3rd party opensource producers who provide repositories for their softwares. Not only binaries, not only packages, but full repositories which can be added to apt/zypper/whatever and get automatically updated
• there's also a great deal of additional external repositories - such as for example "PPA" for ubuntu, Debian multimedia, openSUSE's repositories, and Packman (which is multi-platform, but mostly concentrates on multimedia packages which can't be legally distributed with openSUSE)
• whenever possible people try to package 3rd party commercial application in these repositories - you can find closed source drivers, flash, acrobat, microsoft's font. The only limit is whether the author authorise re-packing and re-distribution. Even then, sometime packagers manage to go around such limitation by making packages which are actually updating scripts (ms fonts works that way)

So, in short, a great deal of software in addition to what came on you CD can already get updated today.

Not only that, but to make the whole experience more user friendly, some like openSUSE have developed method where a single link on a web page can be processed by the package manager and, once given the necessary privilege, with 1 webpage clic, you get automatically the correct repository added and the necessary packages selected.

Meanwhile, with microsoft you get 1 central system (windows updates) which is used for the OS and maybe for a couple of other microsoft products (MS-Office, Visual Studio) as long as the user selects the appropriate service (microsoft updates). Then you have a couple of other software which implements their own incompatible updates tracking (Firefox) of which some are really cumbersome (Acrobat). Virtually everything else is left to rot.

The trailer doesn't play on my PC running VLC, even after VLC spotted the problem and downloaded an update.

'vlc --version' yields :

VLC media player 1.0.0-git Goldeneye

I don't compile my own VLC anymore (I'm too lazy for it). For everything multimedia on my openSUSE, I use package from Packman.
FFmpeg (which handles MPEG4 and variation of it such as the weird "Sorenson" used by quicktime - and whose library "lavcodec" is used by lots of Linux players) gives :

FFmpeg version SVN-r15866, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
    configuration: --shlibdir=/usr/lib64 --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man --libdir=/usr/lib64 --enable-shared --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora --enable-libfaad --enable-libfaac --enable-libxvid --enable-swscale --enable-postproc --enable-gpl --enable-vhook --enable-x11grab --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libdirac --enable-libnut --enable-libgsm --enable-libx264 --enable-libamr-nb --enable-libamr-wb --enable-libdc1394 --enable-nonfree --enable-pthreads
    libavutil 49.12. 0 / 49.12. 0
    libavcodec 52. 3. 0 / 52. 3. 0
    libavformat 52.23. 1 / 52.23. 1
    libavdevice 52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0
    libswscale 0. 6. 1 / 0. 6. 1
    libpostproc 51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0

(Package obtain from the same source).

These combination play the mov file without any problem.

Also note that, in typical Apple fashion : this mov file is only a small URL pointing to the streaming source. For downloading the actual file, I have used the mplayer firefox plugin. My currently installed version is 3.55. The associated Mplayer is :

MPlayer dev-SVN-r27637-4.3-openSUSE Linux 11.0 (x86_64)-Packman (C) 2000-2008 MPlayer Team

The plugin manage to both play the stream (as VLC does) and also download the stream to the harddisk.

I hope this information may help you.

BTW: I agree with you - Apple's behaviour sucks.
To quote a friend of mine (which is beside a great Apple fan) :
Apple is the new Microsoft. Except it is a lot less ugly.

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

SuSE can point to individual update repositories, but not multiple ones, but it's absolutely not built-in. The autoyast tool used by YaST is absolutely not documented, it doesn't report the available command line arguments, and it requires a console interaction to operate becuase it was written by someone who was obvriously writing bad ncurses or X interfaces instead of getting a date, because those tools really play with themselves unnecessarily. You can fake an unattended backup with an "expect" wrapper. But the mixture of menu-driven unresolvabile handling of multiple repositories, coupled with the layering of non-RPM packages such as the NVidia installer (which is pretty poor!) and the Microsoft font installers, neither of which are allowed to be RPM based by the companies that write them, makes it a very difficult job.

Instead, use "fou4s" from http://www.fou4s.org/ and avoid SuSE's crippling of their own audio, video, and CD players for licensing reasons by going to http://packman.links2linux.org/ and setting it up as an auto-download source. That makes your software management and updates almost as good as "yum" or "apt".

If you'd like to get a feel for Linux before installing, try out Mepis (which I'm pretty sure is a LiveCD) or Knoppix (which is not very polished, but does give you a KDE desktop to play with - but Ubuntu is leagues better eye-candy/usability wise).

There is Kubuntu, but it doesn't have Gnome at all, which will eventually cause you problems. You can install Kubuntu then Gnome (which is what I did), but I'd suggest Ubuntu + KDE (as I had to fiddle to get all the necessary parts of Gnome installed under Kubuntu). Then run Automatrix and you've got a fully functional system ready to go.

I started out with SuSE 9.3 (a buddy of mine at work installed it for me). Then within a few weeks 10.0 was out and we did a fresh install. SuSE took a bit of hand holding to get "up and running" (decess for DVDs, mp3 decoding, etc - PackMan is your friend). After playing around in SuSE for a few months (including getting VMware running, then attempting unsuccessfully to install Xandros and Linspire, but successfully getting Win2k running), I got my wife a new laptop (same model as mine with SuSE) and decided to try Kubuntu out.

Frankly for new Linux converts, (k)Ubuntu rocks. The weird issues I have on my SuSE laptop's Synaptic touchpad do not occur under (k)Ubuntu, and it correctly recognized the widescreen monitor (SuSE didn't). Updating is a breeze - just last night I updated her system... 10% of her packages needed to be updated (1500-ish IIRC) and it took a grand total of 25-30 minutes including a kernel update!

I was about to go from SuSE 10.0 to (k)Ubuntu when 10.1 was released a few weeks ago. So I though what the hell and did an update. 10.1 is nice, but it's got some MAJOR issues - the autoupdate, well doesn't, my ATI Drivers no-go-no-mo, Azureus and eventually kTorrent stopped working despite repeated program reinstalls... Basically 10.1 is not for you (or me).

I'll be installing (k)Ubuntu on my laptop this weekend.

I've gotta say, after a bit of a teething process (a good 4-6 weeks of Google searches to get "simple" shit to work, like my ATI drivers, VMware, etc) I'm sooo very much more happy under (k)Ubuntu (even under SuSE 10.0, which is good, just more fiddly)! That 25-30 minute update I mentioned above was while I was surfing the web with 15-20 tabs open in Firefox with the system being responsive the entire time. You just don't get that under Windows!

Good luck on the migration! And if you need help, I'll toss as much your way as I can (being a 4 month old Linux n00b myself).

Install SuSE, and use The Smart Package Manager.

On SuSE, the only thing you cannot install via Smart is support for encrypted DVD playback. That's the one time you'll have to use the commandline, to run this shell script, which automagically downloads/compiles it for you.

Everything else, included the ATI/NVIDIA drivers, can be install via GUI, and configured via GUI.

10.1 just came out. It's super slick. Give it a try.

FYI, MPlayer plays it on my system: MPlayer-1.0pre7-pm.3 from PackMan on SuSE 10.0.

Don't bother with the Professional releases for personal use. While they have applications not found on the public versions, vastly superior replacements and up-to-date replacements for them can generally be found at the http://packman.links2linux.org/ website. MPlayer with support for MPEG, more recent browser releases, and lots of excellent packages that SuSE won't provide for licensing reasons are available this way.

If you need the commercial OS-level support, and are not big enough to hire your own Linux geek, then buy the Professional version. But for sites with more than 100 computers, it's cheaper and more effective to have an in-house geek, because someone has to do the on-site management and debugging anyway to explain things to the SuSE tech support people.

okay, okay... we all still have to test it. but this has good potential to become _the_ distribution. It performs we on both the server side with (with standards, service, licencing, training, certifying, oracle, etc. etc.), and on the desktop side (with loads of UI improvements, YaST, quicker booting, suspend to disk, automatic network configuring).

And it seems that also the doing well on both the corporate (Novell Desktop, SuSE entreprise) and the freesoftware side with this glorious new release.

i really whish OpenSuse the best, yet im not installing right now since 9.3 still does all i need and i have a lack of spare time already. but i will be soon!

if you are installing make shure to check out:
http://www.suseforums.net/ -- all things suse inlcuding community support, and
http://packman.links2linux.org/ -- the missing (some times not fully legal) mulitmedia packages.

g'luck,
Cies Breijs.

You may have to reinstall... it depends on how much damage compiling the media players from scratch did :)

I'll try and help you through this, however....
1. Reinstall *all* the mplayer and xine packages from the original RPM. Obviously, you won't need to do this if you reinstall your whole system.

2. Go to SuSE YaST Online Update. Get the updates 'multimedia pack 1-4'. If you've already installed them, toggle down to 'All Packages', and 'Refresh (reinstall)' them.

3. Go to http://packman.links2linux.org/?action=122. There is a link to a script there that will download libdvdcss2 and compile it for your system. This will enable dvd playback in the included versions of Mplayer and Xine. Once Xine is capable of playing DVDs, Kaffeine and all the other Xine based players will be capable of it.

The direct link is here http://www.iiv.de/schwinde/buerger/tremmel/downloa ds/script_rpm4/install_libdvdcss2

4. Go to http://packman.links2linux.org/?action=124. Grab xine-lib and w32codecs. This will enable quicktime playback, WMV playback, ASF playback, etc . . .

This support is *not* 100%. You will not be able to play all quicktimes. I haven't figured out why; however, many of the quicktimes will not play on my Mac or Windows systems either. /shrug. Some people encode quicktimes in weird non-standard codecs.

5. Done. Most your media will work. If you find stuff that you cannot play, it means you need to find an RPM for that particular codec. Some are hard to chase down for *any* platform, meaning I've found quicktimes I cannot play on Linux, OS X, or Windows.

You can find a yast-source for packman.links2linux.org on their site somewhere. I recommend downloading the RPMs and installing them one by one, simply because its not always complete, and sometimes I've found packages in their yast-source that do not exist on the site (this can cause screwed up dependencies).

Now, your flash problem. I have no idea why that occurs :) I've never seen anything like it. Are you running the 64-bit version of suse, or the 32-bit one (I have flash working in both)? Did you try to upgrade your flash with the one from Macromedia's site? Have you updated your system to the latest one from YoU?

I suggest trying to reinstall Konqueror and Flash from RPM. I've installed SuSE 9.3 (from the DVD and CD) on about 15 machines, and all have properly working Flash.

Also, you can disable ARTS, as a temporary solution for Mozilla/Firefox. Arts can be disabled by typing killall artsd. Arts can be permantely disabled by using the KDE control panel under sound system. This will allow your sound to work, though, your system should have dmix enabled by default, allowing multiple programs to access the sound card. Have you altered your .asoundrc in your home directory? Keep in mind that the root user does not get an .asoundrc, so dmix is not enabled by default for root. I believe uninstalling and reinstalling your soundcard using YaST will correct this.

I've had the same exact problems as you when I've tried to install this stuff from source. You've got to get all the directory options for ./configure exactly right, or everything breaks. You're much better off using RPMs if you can find them, and for SuSE, packman.links2linux.org is the place to go.

You may have to reinstall... it depends on how much damage compiling the media players from scratch did :)

I'll try and help you through this, however....
1. Reinstall *all* the mplayer and xine packages from the original RPM. Obviously, you won't need to do this if you reinstall your whole system.

2. Go to SuSE YaST Online Update. Get the updates 'multimedia pack 1-4'. If you've already installed them, toggle down to 'All Packages', and 'Refresh (reinstall)' them.

3. Go to http://packman.links2linux.org/?action=122. There is a link to a script there that will download libdvdcss2 and compile it for your system. This will enable dvd playback in the included versions of Mplayer and Xine. Once Xine is capable of playing DVDs, Kaffeine and all the other Xine based players will be capable of it.

The direct link is here http://www.iiv.de/schwinde/buerger/tremmel/downloa ds/script_rpm4/install_libdvdcss2

4. Go to http://packman.links2linux.org/?action=124. Grab xine-lib and w32codecs. This will enable quicktime playback, WMV playback, ASF playback, etc . . .

This support is *not* 100%. You will not be able to play all quicktimes. I haven't figured out why; however, many of the quicktimes will not play on my Mac or Windows systems either. /shrug. Some people encode quicktimes in weird non-standard codecs.

5. Done. Most your media will work. If you find stuff that you cannot play, it means you need to find an RPM for that particular codec. Some are hard to chase down for *any* platform, meaning I've found quicktimes I cannot play on Linux, OS X, or Windows.

You can find a yast-source for packman.links2linux.org on their site somewhere. I recommend downloading the RPMs and installing them one by one, simply because its not always complete, and sometimes I've found packages in their yast-source that do not exist on the site (this can cause screwed up dependencies).

Now, your flash problem. I have no idea why that occurs :) I've never seen anything like it. Are you running the 64-bit version of suse, or the 32-bit one (I have flash working in both)? Did you try to upgrade your flash with the one from Macromedia's site? Have you updated your system to the latest one from YoU?

I suggest trying to reinstall Konqueror and Flash from RPM. I've installed SuSE 9.3 (from the DVD and CD) on about 15 machines, and all have properly working Flash.

Also, you can disable ARTS, as a temporary solution for Mozilla/Firefox. Arts can be disabled by typing killall artsd. Arts can be permantely disabled by using the KDE control panel under sound system. This will allow your sound to work, though, your system should have dmix enabled by default, allowing multiple programs to access the sound card. Have you altered your .asoundrc in your home directory? Keep in mind that the root user does not get an .asoundrc, so dmix is not enabled by default for root. I believe uninstalling and reinstalling your soundcard using YaST will correct this.

I've had the same exact problems as you when I've tried to install this stuff from source. You've got to get all the directory options for ./configure exactly right, or everything breaks. You're much better off using RPMs if you can find them, and for SuSE, packman.links2linux.org is the place to go.

Already had the 5 CD set downloaded, burnt, and installed as of last Thursday from a bit torrent version that had the blessings of Novell. Yes, it indeed took several days to get it via Bit Torrent at 44kps. But it was so worth it to beat the slashdot crowd!

Yes, getting multimedia up and running is a bit of an effort. No, it's not hard:

How To fix multimedia in SuSE 9.3

Yast Update Online - install the "multimedia pack 1, 2, 3" updates.

But it doesn't have....no, wait...SuSE users frequently find additional rpm packages on Packman that meet their additional needs:

Packman
Have lots of fun!

• a developer more often than not not have enough resources to test with significant linux distro version; if there are contributors for various distros, they provide packages exactly like that: for distro XYZ version number A.B
• if the distro packages the program/lib, then you get exactly that - a binary packade targeted to a specific distro version
• if you go into the 'bleeding edge' region, you should not always expect full support for a 'stable' distro.

Well, if you're looking for suggestions I recommend Suse. It's been very good to me, and IMO yast kicks the ass of anything else out there for install/setup/administration.

Yeah, they don't offer free iso downloads, but you can install it directly from their ftp server (which actually ends up being much more efficient).

What I recommend for a noob, though, is to just go out and buy the boxed set. The printed manuals are well worth the price of admission, in fact when I was learning Linux they were hands down the most useful books I had (and I had several).

Suse Pro is your best bet, even though it's pretty expensive ($99) it comes with tons of apps (a dual layer dvd for binaries, another for source, plus all the binaries on 5 cds for those who haven't upgraded their hardware in a while) and all the manuals you could need. The Update version is $59 and is the same as Pro as far as software, but only comes with the Admin manual. I haven't tried their Personal edition, which is the cheapest, but from what I've heard it includes a lot less apps (which may be fine for you?) and doesn't have the Admin manual (but does have the user guides).

The only sticking point really is that, for legal reasons, they don't include support for proprietary media codecs. However, that's easily remedied by a visit to Packman.

Umm... what? Yes, you do have to get the Packman packages to play DVDs and the like, but how do you get that apt "barely works?"

Ditto for the "weak" dependency checker in YaST. If a package has dependencies improperly set then yes, it'll choke, but so will any package manager.

The trick with Suse is not to install from source if you don't have to. If you want something other than what they provide in the release it can usually be found in .rpm form in various places, including the Suse ftp site (many of the developers have their own folders where they provide such things) and packman. Clicking on an rpm in Konqueror gives you and "Install using Yast" button. Must of the time if there are any dependency issues Yast will just ask you to insert your install media and it gets taken care of automagically.

Since figuring that out, the only app I've had any trouble with is mplayer, which required a lib that wasn't included (lzo). In those cases where you have to install from source for whatever reason, replace 'make install' with 'checkinstall' (included on the Suse discs but not installed by default). This will produce an rpm which you should then install as above.

Anyway, it was actually ease of use that drove me to Linux. I came to a point where it became obvious that I could either spend my time fixing my computer with Windows, or using it with Linux. I spend enough time fixing computers at work, so it was an easy decision. Of course, as always, YMMV. I had already been dilligent in my hardware purchases, so that wasn't an issue for me, though in all honesty I've had a lot more hardware compatability issues with Win2k than with Suse.

Here are my somewhat un-organized thoughts on this issue: Mandrake tends to be buggier (hopefully their new Community and then Official release system will solve this), has poorer configuration tools, but has more third-party packages and has urpmi, which is like apt-get. Basically, you type "urpmi programname" and it automagically downloads and installs it and any other programs or libraries it is dependent on. Mandrake is reasonably fast (moreso than Fedora)

SuSE has a GREAT configurator (called YaST), is stable, but has fewer third-party RPMS (and many of the sites are german-only, SuSE's home language), and there is no urpmi-like tool. It has a great manual though, but is a bit slower than Mandrake. It also has its own ways of doing things, and configuration and the structure of the filesystem are substantially different than other Linuxes. They also leave out divx and DVD support, due to legal concerns -- adding these is a snap in Mandrake (just add the PLF repository to your urpmi config and type urpmi mplayer), but is a bitch in SuSE (you have to track down a bunch of packages and dependancies from Packman). SuSE has a better selection of games. Also, if you want to config things by hand it is a cinch in Mandrake (Mandrake modifies your existing config files if you use the GUI tools), but it is a pain in SuSE (Suse ignores or writes overtop of your hand-made files next time you do anything in YaST -- things you hand-configured will not be picked up by YaST, it maintains its own internal database, and then writes that out to the normal config files.)

If you just want a machine that is ready to go for basic office tasks, SuSE is probably best. If you want to potentially customize your system a little, Mandrake is probably the best.

Both include a full set of dev tools, but they are not installed by default.

though for suse a fully capable binary install exist elsewhere

They can be found here:
xine and/or kaffeine packages
MPLayer
Win 32 codecs

Other things can also be found at http://packman.links2linux.org

though for suse a fully capable binary install exist elsewhere

They can be found here:
xine and/or kaffeine packages
MPLayer
Win 32 codecs

Other things can also be found at http://packman.links2linux.org

though for suse a fully capable binary install exist elsewhere

They can be found here:
xine and/or kaffeine packages
MPLayer
Win 32 codecs

Other things can also be found at http://packman.links2linux.org

though for suse a fully capable binary install exist elsewhere

They can be found here:
xine and/or kaffeine packages
MPLayer
Win 32 codecs

Other things can also be found at http://packman.links2linux.org

twit... it's all prebuilt for you at PackmanThere's only libdvdcss and maybe some windows codecs to fetch as packman can't carry them.