Novell has taken the safe path like RHEL, in that they don’t include any controversial codecs and such with the distribution. However, unlike RHEL, Novell actually cripples their bundled media players, so that you have to rebuild them, get someone else to do it, or use something else. For most releases up to 11.1, the openSUSE community provides a one-click upgrade to fix all that. You can click here for the KDE desktop and it should immediately try to install.
This has not yet been set up for 11.2, in part because the Packman part of the deal is not yet ready. But there is a repository for it, and it’s part way there. I tracked down the manual route which does the same thing as the one-click. If you don’t want to do Zypper from the commandline, you can, you just have to enable it through YaST: YaST > Software > Software Repositories. Click the “add” button at the lower left-hand corner and select the Community Repositories button. From the list, select Packman and Videolan and that should cover it. Then use YaST to install the packages listed in the instructions there, but not all of them.
There is one thing I don’t understand: Why does the Packman Team insist on forcing 32-bit on a 64-bit system? I’ve never gotten an answer to that. It seems almost obscene, and I don’t know of any other distros or third party supports which do that. It’s not necessary, nor even the best way any more. So don’t install the flash-player and the w32codecs. Instead, go get the codecs package from Mplayer HQ directly, open the package and copy the resulting files to /usr/lib64/codecs and it should work just fine. You can get the 64-bit Flashplayer directly from Adobe.com. Once you open that package, it’s just a single file you should copy into /usr/lib64/browser-plugins/.
Further, as a fan of Opera’s browser suite, let me warn you the version you get from SUSE is broken, trying to add some sort of Qt4 support. Just install Qt3 and use the browser you get directly from Opera; they have one marked for openSUSE 11.2 64-bit. I admit the fonts are ugly on mine, but it’s functional. Flash didn’t work at first, lacking any sound. After poking around, I found the mixer by default had the PCM slider all the way down. After pushing it up to about 75% I got good sound from the Flashplayer. I note in passing the installer didn’t turn on the Pulse Audio, and I didn’t bother trying to change that.
So maybe — just maybe — we will have a SUSE release good enough to keep. It’s been awhile; the last one I kept as long as possible was 8.2.
