I am at a complete loss.
And what exactly is your problem, except that you are “at a complete loss”?
People might be able to help you better, if you tell that.
In particular, please tell what you want to achieve, and how you fail.
What are you trying to do, what error messages do you get, and so on.
And saying what openSUSE version you are using won’t hurt either.
gchords is a guitar notation program; it is not currently in CTAN but you can download the whole package from http://ctan.math.utah.edu/ctan/tex-archive/systems/texlive/tlnet/archive/gchords.doc.tar.xz. In it you will find the documentation.
I know that very well.
Just install the package “texlive-gchords” that’s included in openSUSE. 
If you install “texlive-gchords-doc” as well you will have the documentation in /usr/share/texmf/doc/latex/gchords/…