New Suser needs help/advice

Hi all Im a new user to Suse and looking forward to having a great experience. Ive been using Linux for a few years now but havent strayed away from Debian based distros as I feel that they are my comfort zone. Lately though Ive been feeling board with my desktop so I thought I switch things up a little by trying out rpm/yast but there are some things I need to know before i get started so i dont mess up my install (which Ive already done once). K, so to start let me just say that Im using the KDE4 version.

  1. After I installed the first time I found that it would freeze up at random spots, like during boot (not always though). Is this a common problem that is solved by grabbing some updates or is it just me and my machine do you think? (Compaq Presario F500)

  2. Upon clean install how do I properly set up my updates? I tried it once and it asked me which repos I wanted to use, so I chose the ones I figured were needed. That led to a download window that seemed never ending, lol. Am I not supposed to select anything from that window? And if so can u elaborate on which ones I really need.

  3. How should I go about getting my nvidia card properly installed?

Thats all I can think of for now and thanks in advance, your help is appreciated.

Almost forgot, can you also direct me to a guide on how to get restricted formats running. THNX

1 - Haven’t noticed openSUSE freezing at all here. Not sure.

2 - I never really use their “update” service, which only pulls out specific security updates. I generally just open up “Install Software”, select repositories, and then System. Then I right click in the packages window and select “Update all”. It updates every package on my box.

3 - NVIDIA - openSUSE - One click installer.

Restricted Formats/11.0 - openSUSE-Community - 1-click installer and you’re good to go.

As for other generic openSUSE advice, I wouldn’t use KDE 4 unless you update to the very latest KDE 4.1 betas. Let me know if you have any more questions.

Thanks for the speedy reply.

Not a problem.

I please to aim, or something like that. :stuck_out_tongue:

1 more question. Are there any repos I need to add to the list to get good software?

It depends on what you’re looking for.

Software.openSUSE.org

That will help you find any software that isn’t already in your repositories.

The restricted formats installer will add Packman, which is a great software repo.

I like to add some KDE repos since I use KDE. If you want KDE 4, this is the one I recommend.

Index of /repositories/KDE:/KDE4:/Factory:/Desktop/openSUSE_11.0

For KDE 3, you may want:

Index of /repositories/KDE:/Community/openSUSE_11.0

or

Index of /repositories/KDE:/Backports/openSUSE_11.0

You can just browse the repos with a web browser and see if they have packages you want.

I also like to add the OpenOffice repo to get the very latest OpenOffice.

Index of /repositories/OpenOffice.org:/UNSTABLE/openSUSE_11.0

That has a great built of the latest OpenOffice 3.0 beta.