I have a pretty big pdf I downloaded, which I want to view, but I dont know of any software which comes with Suse 11.1 which opens pdf’s nicely. It wanted to open with GIMP originally, which I’d obviously rather not do, but I cant find gpdf on my machine. Is there anything already there which I should find?
I do not know if you use gnome or kde, but it seems gnome. There should be a viewer in gnome.
Substantially there is a mountain high of viewers available. It is your choide if you install them or not.
Kpdf comes with kde and works very well, if you use 3.5. If you use a 4.x version you have the very powerful “Okular”.
If you have the “non oss” repository activated it takes a click to install Acrobat Reader. Although the program appears heavy and less well programmed the the opensource versions, it comes still with the same interface as the windows version.
One remark, this is really a question that appears to indicate that you did not even look at your program folders. Generally it helps to right click on a file and choose Open with… to see the currently associated programs with that kind of file.
That should be fairly easy now.
I did try right clicking, but as I said, GIMP was its preferred choice, it didnt come up with anything else. I have found Okular now though, so thanks for that.
If you right click a .pdf and go to properties and then to the small Spanner icon you can configure applications pref order.
Okular or Adobe acrobat reader, which can be installed too. Sometimes Okular has troubles with certain pdf’s that are very recently created, but you can add editing remarks in Okular. 
Evince is a nice PDF reader for Gnome - I use Evince on a KDE3 desktop too.