[Wylug-help] Installing SuSE Packages

[Dave Fisher]

On Sat, Jul 03, 2004 at 11:41:48PM +0100, Dave Fisher wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I've just been helping a friend setup ADSL on a SuSE system.  The
> netwoking's fine, but I've either forgotten everything I ever knew
> about SuSE Configs or they've changed.
>
> Can someone tell me the best way of accessing and installing third
> party software, (e.g. firefox) without shagging SuSE's configs?

Oh, I should have explained that this is SuSE 'Personal' 9.1. which
appears to be very much locked-down and perhaps a little dumbed-down,
e.g. no updatedb/locate command, can't use find because the file system
changes during a search, can't play dvds with xine because there's no
decryption/region stuff, can't find network config files that the router
manual claims that SuSE has, can install firefox, but can't run it
because the user which doesn't have permission to access the X server
... etc.

In short, to achieve a reasonably capable system, quite a lot of
additional software may need to be installed, plus some hand-crafted
re-configuration.  I was hoping that someone with recent experience of
this 'Personal' distro could briefly explain how SuSE expects you to
this, and whether there are safe alternatives, e.g. how do I satisfy
missing rpm dependencies? are SuSE rpms completely version-specific? is
there an apt or apt-like package for SuSE that plays well with Yast?

Dave