Ive just come over from Mint. Not because I didnt like it, I did, Just that for some reason I had to always boot in safe mode and fix files every time. Its this Nvidia Video card i think.
So! Here I am with openSUSE installed. It looks great but so many things just dont work and sadly they are the very things I use a computer for!
I cant play CD’s ( Ive become a member of cdrom,wheel,audio,disk and it made no difference)
I cant play dvd’s
I cant use what is an important online support group that I use ( Its a Java applet)
Im a patient guy and will do my best to figure this all out but a week into having openSUSE and its good looks are wearing thin. Im using the 64bit version of Opensuse 11.1
Please, does anyone have any idea how I can resolve these issues?
Next time, before you patience, and openSUSE good looks start to wear thin, please visit sooner. There are lots of skilled volunteer enthusiasts (for we are mostly a volunteer forum) while chime in with hopefully helpful suggestions.
Before I address your specific questions, let me pontificate a bit (sorry) about openSUSE philosophy. Multimedia as provided by Novell/SuSE-GmbH is mostly crippled for all proprietary codecs. This is because openSUSE is openSUSE. Note the emphasis on open. Novell/SuSE-GmbH try harder than most Linux distributions, to ensure openSUSE adheres reasonably close to the open source freesoftware philsophy, which is to NOT PROVIDE software which is NOT free to give away, and not provide software which is NOT free to copy, and not provide software which is NOT free to modify, and not provide software which is NOT free to give away modified copies. This means many proprietary hardware drivers, and proprietary video/audio codecs, and many price free proprietary applications (but not opensource free) are not included with Novell/SuSE’s open source Linux “openSUSE”.
But you can EASILY get 3rd party packages to work around this. EASILY. Setup your Software Package Manger with OSS, Non-OSS, Update and Packman repositories. Just those 4. No others. None. You can add others ONLY after you learn the risks and problems that exist with the others, and ONLY after you learn how to work around the dependency and other problems that can crop up as a result of adding extra repositories (repos). There is guidance here for adding repos to openSUSE Repositories - openSUSE-Community … click on your SuSE version and follow the instructions and add ONLY OSS, Non-OSS, Update and Packman. Just those 4. In particular, do NOT add videolan, as some of its apps and codecs are not compatible with packman and will cause breakage.
Now, you may have figured this out already, but just in case not, I typically recommend, after the 4 repos are added, with your PC connected to the internet, go to YaST > Software > Software Management and change the “filter” to “search” and install the packman packaged versions of smplayer, mplayerplug-in, vlc, libxine1, libffmpeg0, w32codec-all, amarok, amarok-xine. That should get your started. For openSUSE-11.0 and earlier, you will need to remove xine-lib before installing libxine1.
To play dvds, you will need libdvdcss2, libdvdnav4, libdvdread3 and libdvdread4. The last 3 from Packman. The first one (libdvdcss) from videolan. So add the videolan repos, install libdvdcss, and remove videolan repos. Note again the 11.1 bug requires your user to belong to group ‘disk’ and group ‘cdrom’.
You will need be more specific as to the application. But if you need basic java support, simply go to YaST > Software > Software management, and do a search under java (change filter to search).
I’ll be away on vacation for the next 2.5 weeks, but I’m sure there are many other enthusiasts who can volunteer suggestions in case you have more questions.
Thanks to Oldcpu for excellent helping advice. Wish I had had a chance to read it before I learned, well am still learning, the hard way. Worth a sticky up front I suggest.
Best wishes for great Holiday.
Budgie2
I spent some time looking into the state of 64-bit Java plug-ins on Linux and for now either java-1_6_0-openjdk-plugin available from the standard repositories or Sun’s JRE and plug-in available from https://jdk6.dev.java.net/6uNea.html seem to be the way to go.
I haven’t actually installed Sun’s offering, but if I were to do so I would grab the tarball version, extract it into /opt, modify my $PATH in ~/.profile to point at the extracted bin directory first, and set up a symlink for the java plugin in ~/.mozilla/plugins. I’m sure there is a much cleaner way to handle this with update-alternatives, but I’ve never bothered to learn exactly how that works. If you decide to go this route and need more explicit instructions, I would be happy to download it and log my steps.
Isn’t there a one-click somewhere to install this? I remember there being one for either 10.2 or 10.3 but am not sure where it is and whether it is still available for 11.x.
Sure, but I don’t (and never have) recommend it. IMHO its far better to setup one’s repositories. Once they are setup, it is superior to one click, and it also takes only ‘one-click’ in one’s package manager when the repos are setup. In fact, it takes LESS CLICKS when one’s repos are setup.
I cannot thank you enough for such a concise answer. Its new years eve so Im going to do this all on the 2nd of Jan.
I also see the point of the philosophy. Thank you for outlining that.
Would doing all this mean I can transfer a file from the computer to a memory card? At present, it wont allow drag and drop in any way, ‘copy here’ and ‘move here’ both meet with an error message saying I don’t have permissions. I considered joining root but am dichotomous about that for security reasons.
Patience restored:)
Will post results of all amendments made and any work arounds I figure out early Jan.
You should be able to, but I think it depends on how you mount the memory card (and what sort of hardware is used to mount the memory card).
I plug in my blackberry, mount it with manual commands from the konsole (on occasions when it is not hot plug automounted) and drag and drop custom prepared videos to the black berry.
Hey
Thanks for that. The memory card is for a mobile phone and I was trying to drag and drop tunes onto the memory card ( in a card reader)so that I could get them on my phone.
Progress update: Ive got the cd audio working with the supplied cd player and also in Kaffeine. I understand theres a bug with Amarok, no biggy for me.
If you decide to go this route and need more explicit instructions, I would be happy to download it and log my steps.