I have experience with Slackware Linux for more than a decade. I am a SUSE Leap newbie.
If I want to download an app from a SUSE repository (e.g. Gnu COBOL) how do I go about it?
John Culleton
For example through https://software.opensuse.org/package/gnu-cobol
And mind, you tagged your post with Leap 42.2 but that’s still in beta ( and this really means beta in this case, since it includes KDE 5.8 beta ). But, I see that gnu-cobol has not yet been built for the Leap versions.
Furthermore YaST has a Software module to manage software and repositories, more info is on the website.
Packages from openSUSE distribution repositories are easiest installed with the YaST Software Manager. Other supported “special interest” repositories can be found in download.opensuse.org/repositories. The sub-directory “home”: contains personal repositories (called “unstable”), which I think are what Slackware calls “alien”. All these can be searched using the url provided by Knurpht. The easieast way to find a package from an openSUSE version of Firefox is to enter e.g. “Cobol” into the search bar and select the “openSUSE Software” search engine. This is a similar situation to Slackware regardung Cobol.
Poking around with the software searches will show that their are two unstable builds of GnuCobol for the rolling release , Tumbleweed. There is a good chance that one of them would install in Leap-42.2 Bera2 without too much trouble. If need be you might try adding the Tumbleweed repository at a lower priority (e.g. priority level=106) in an attempt to resolve dependency issues.
As you are running beta software, I take it that you are experimenting and prepared for stuff not to work?
you can also download 3rd party binaries in rpm format from the internet (like skype) and install them with rpm or zypper (or yast)
you can also get prebuild deb and tgz packages and convert them to rpm with alien (like xnviewmp) this is not recommended