[Gllug] DivX on SUSE 8.1 Personal Edition

[Simon Stewart]

My house-mate is slowly making the transition from Windows to Linux 
after having his machine choke one too many times. He's got some fairly 
typical expectations, such as being able to browse the web, rip CDs and 
play movies. He's bought a copy of Suse 8.1 "personal edition" in the 
(not unreasonable) belief that it should meet all his expectations.

Of course, it's not quite that easy. For some inexplicable reason, the 
version of SUSE that he has doesn't appear to ship with any of the 
devel packages (specifically those for gtk and glib) This is a problem 
because the version of mplayer that ships with SUSE doesn't play back 
DivXs (you can see where this is going, can't you?) His argument, and I 
agree, is that since this is meant to be a personal edition, and 
therefore probably bought by migrating Windows users, so if one wants 
to compile something from source it shouldn't be necessary to hit the 
Suse FTP server, knowing which package you're looking for, and how to 
install that package (resolving any dependencies) using RPM (assuming 
that you realise that "rpm" is the command to use, that is)

So, two questions: am I missing something obvious (some hidden setting 
is yast, perhaps, or an invisible package in the "install software" 
option, or, best of all, an option to update the list of available 
packages and then "do the right thing") And can anyone suggest a Suse 
and KDE friendly media player, that comes with support for MPEG, AVI 
and DivX?

Cheers,

Simon


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