When you install OpenSUSE, one of the first things you may wish to do is to install new applications or support for restricted media playback. To do this, you’ll need to configure your repositories. This blog post explains how it’s done.
When you install OpenSUSE, one of the first things you may wish to do is to install new applications or support for restricted media playback. To do this, you’ll need to configure your repositories. This blog post explains how it’s done.
One of the great things about OpenSUSE is that it’s extremely easy to install support for all of the common restricted formats, including encrypted DVDs.
Go to http://opensuse-community.org/Restricted_Formats, click on the version (11.4 if a new install) and then select the link for KDE or Gnome.
Simple (albeit not legal in some jurisdictions)!
Most mainstream distributions have made this pretty easy. It’s no more difficult to add Medibuntu to an Ubuntu system than it is to add the restricted formats repo to opensuse, for example. Even some of the more diy distros like Archlinux make this easy:
pacman -S libdvdcss gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
Well, for GNOME anyway. I can’t comment on KDE as I don’t use it. The legality of it may be debateable, but personally, I’ll be damned if someone’s going to tell me on which devices I’m permitted to play my legally purchased dvds or music.
One click support seems to confuse things because they’re just clicking on stuff but don’t really know what it’s doing. As of now, to get things working as well as possible, the best thing to do is set up your repositories in YaST. It’ll be nice though when opensuse finishes the software center project they’re working on. Working with repositories and packages is unnecessarily complex nowadays for users just to install software.
Holy long article, Batman! Doesn’t anyone have a problem with the fact that in a 2011 OS you need to read a 3 page article just to install some software? Just a thought … maybe that’s why the year of the Linux Desktop is yet to come?
I have to agree, the linuxmint and ubuntu software centers Ive seen are definitely a much simpler way of doing things. Repositories and priorities should be done in the background, but until there’s a good software center for opensuse (bazaar project?) you’ll have to configure things yourself. Still, there’s a reason why OpenSUSE is one of the most popular KDE distros, they offer a great rock solid system if you configure things correctly.
he could have encapsulated it all into a few cli commands for you to copy/paste in a terminal, or embedded the one click install link that was given in the first comment of this article. But a lot of linux guides try not to hide the complexity as much as possible and try to get people to understand what they are doing instead of blindly clicking links.
Edited 2011-03-14 20:41 UTC
Well, to be fair there’s a bunch of screenshots in there and things are explained to some depth. On the other hand, I’ve always found the OpenSUSE package management to be incredibly awkward and counter-intuitive.