Package Sources And Restricted Formats

This howto is version-agnostic (presuming 10.0+), as the tutorials are demarcated into version sections. Firstly, there is adding the relevant Package Sources:
http://opensuse-community.org/Package_Sources

This will add:

• Online Source
• Packman
• Guru

Once your package sources are enabled, you can then simply install the necessary packages you will require for enabling certain Restricted Formats:
http://opensuse-community.org/Restricted_Formats

This includes:

• MP3 Playback
• Playing Encrypted DVDs
• Playing DiVX/xvid videos, and
• Windows Codecs

For more information on the openSUSE Community website, check here: http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/in...howtopic=50133

Agree. Its already a great site, and its getting even better daily.

from the openSUSE Community site...

If you use SUSE Linux 10.1, or openSUSE 10.2, we recommend that you disable ZMD before proceeding, as we think it is not necessary and will only cause more problems for most users. You can use YaST for managing software just fine, both in 10.1 and 10.2, without it[/b]

Why disable it??? I use rug/zmd on openSUSE 10.2 with Packman and Guru repos without a problem here...

I don't use YaST as it's buggy, crashes all the time without even giving a message why it crashed

I use SMART (waaaaaaaay better than YaST) to install/remove packages and zen-updater to get new updates. I don't even touch YaST

both zen-updater and SMART have the same repos here

from the openSUSE Community site...
Why disable it??? I use rug/zmd on openSUSE 10.2 with Packman and Guru repos without a problem here... [/b]

This happened after an overwhelming general consensus that ZMD is far too heavy for a general desktop system, that it will cause problems (we still have many bug reports about this), that its implementation in openSUSE is still very shaky, and there were many posts and discussions on ZMD's problems on the mailing list. In fact, for 10.3 ZMD will no longer exist as default, and it's replaced by the openSUSE Software Management pattern.

I don't use YaST as it's buggy, crashes all the time without even giving a message why it crashed[/b]

It's very buggy when ZMD is around and it has to sync with it! If you remove that stuff, it should be fine though.

I use SMART (waaaaaaaay better than YaST) to install/remove packages and zen-updater to get new updates. I don't even touch YaST[/b]

Smart is good, but so is zypper! Smart's GUI is also not as friendly as YaST's, though. One problem with YaST/Zypper at the moment is the time they take to reparse the cache; this is getting a big overhaul for 10.3, so hopefully that will help.

We recommend using YaST/Zypper because they are the default applications openSUSE comes with, and they do work (if they are a bit slow on some spots). Smart is great too though, so wherever possible we should have instructions for that too.

I agree with all you wrote, except in the last quote. If you search this forum you'll see that people complain a lot more about YaST/zypper/zmd than they do about SMART. In fact zypper/opensuseupdater never worked like they should here, I already posted a bug report about that

smart on the other hand, is very fast and very easy to use, even for noobs.... (and they love it)

The other thing that's bad in SUSE is that we now have rug/zmd, zypper/YaST, yum, smart... which all seem to do the exact same thing, install/remove/update software

For noobs this can be a (huge) disadvantage as it'll confuse them... which one should i use now? smart, zypper, rug/zmd, YaST..... why so many programs that do the same?

If we wanna make SUSE great, then design a stable, fast, state of the art central package manager. There is no point in confusing newcomers with different software that does the same, except, the one works, the other works sometimes, the third one doesn't work at all or is buggy

Also, why did you even introduced a software managing system based on Mono and broke a perfectly working one??? O.o
can't you write a native Linux one? I don't want MS pollution on my system. If i want to use DLL's then I'll install Windows

I agree with all you wrote, except in the last quote. If you search this forum you'll see that people complain a lot more about YaST/zypper/zmd than they do about SMART. In fact zypper/opensuseupdater never worked like they should here, I already posted a bug report about that[/b]

Out of interest, link? Though I don't disagree that smart works fine, it does here too, and I use it occassionally as well.

The other thing that's bad in SUSE is that we now have rug/zmd, zypper/YaST, yum, smart... which all seem to do the exact same thing, install/remove/update software[/b]

Indeed. The openSUSE SM stack (zypper/libzypp-yast) didn't get a complete amount of testing, so it wasn't made in default. Though fortunately this will be fixed and made very mature for 10.3. I'm pretty sure these changes will be backported as well.

If we wanna make SUSE great, then design a stable, fast, state of the art central package manager. There is no point in confusing newcomers with different software that does the same, except, the one works, the other works sometimes, the third one doesn't work at all or is buggy[/b]

I agree, and the package management issue has been a big problem in openSUSE for two versions now. Hopefully these will be sorted out for the next version, at least.

Also, why did you even introduced a software managing system based on Mono and broke a perfectly working one??? O.o[/b]

This was enforced by Novell who wanted, pretty much, to have the same package management stack over Enterprise/openSUSE. Of course, its implementation into openSUSE was not that easy at all, its design [architecture] very bad, and certainly not suited to a simple desktop computer. I can see how ZMD might be good in an enterprise because of the wealth of features it has for dealing with such situations, but having it on openSUSE is a bad call. This shall be rectified.

Out of interest, link? Though I don't disagree that smart works fine, it does here too, and I use it occassionally as well.
[/b]

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=231460

though when i posted this bug report, it was only about opensuseupdater with zmd. After that, I removed zmd and tried to use zypper but never got any updates... so at the end, i removed opensuseupdater and installed rug/zmd and zen-updater back again. I don't play anymore with zypper here

zmd got a huge boost in 10.2 and despite it uses Mono (which i hate) i like it. I just did a KDE update here this morning (42 packages) and it took me only a few minutes to install all stuff (not counting the downloads)... It's really fast now and it doesn't hog the disk like it was on 10.1 while parsing data when you first login into KDE