I’m a total newb to Linux, am trying out different versions. I’ve installed opensuse 11 from Live CD yesterday on an old PIII IBM thinkpad. The main aim is to use this laptop, connected to the TV to play avi files off a USB external hdd. I tried playing some files using kaffine (?) and got some error message saying this file is not supported (cant remember the exact error message). I’ve read on other forums that people are getting Mplayer or codecs, but i have no idea how to install them. I have downloaded the following files:
MPlayer-1.0rc2.tar.bz2
all-20061022.tar.bz2
can someone give me directions as to how to achieve my goal? i need nothing else, just to be able to play videos.
I’m amazed you managed to get openSUSE-11.0 running on that old PC.
The first thing I recommend you do is read up on openSUSE concepts. You need to learn to crawl before you can run, and you are trying to take off at a sprint. The likelyhood is you will trip, fall, and get very frustrated.
Having read that you will now see that downloading tarballs (like you proposed) is not the path for newbies to follow. Its far better to download and install rpms. You will also have read in that concepts page that you need to setup up software package managers to make your software installation REAL EASY !! And openSUSE comes with YaST Software Management and Zypper installed by default. You just need to setup their repositories.
So assuming your old PC is on the Internet, go to this URL Repositories/11.0 - openSUSE-Community
and follow its guidance to setup repositories for ONLY oss, non-oss, update and Packman. No others. NONE!! Wait a few months, until you learn more, before you starting adding others. Note not all repositories are compatible with each other, and problems can occur. Remember, ONLY oss, non-oss, update and packman. You must setup those. And no others.
So after your repositories are setup, exit YaST, and install the packman packaged version of mplayer and kaffeine, … and other apps. Do that by opening a konsole and first type “su” to get root permissions (enter root password). Then use zypper to install a bunch of apps from that konsole. Type:
