Hi, I am about to give openSUSE a try and just wondering if Fedora, or even Mandriva. .rpms are the same type you will find in SUSE? I know to install YUM first I think but otherwise I want to assume you can use them in SUSE? I have a full Fedora software Dvd that could be added if so. Oh, and are Fuse packages and repos easy to add to SUSE? I tried adding a mirror in Yast earlier and it came back with an error, and on about four different mirrors at that. Thanks!

To answer your question, Yes, openSuSE is able to have almost any RPM installed as long as you have all the dependencies met.

The main CLI update tool for SuSE is zypper.

YaST(CLI) & YaST2(GUI) are SuSE specific system management tools and you will get errors as the XML GPG Key information is not for SuSE based distro and as such YaST may not work right. You will first need to install YUM using either YaST or zypper and then add the repo to YUM's configuration. Then you will be able to use YUM to install, just keep in mind that you might not meet the dependencies needed for proper install depending on how the RPM was packaged.

I have personally used YUM, APT, and Zypper on openSuSE to install packages. If you install alien you will be able to install .deb packages as well. The only issue that you might have is this, if the RPM was designed specifically for a specific release then it might not play well, although I have not had an issue with this since 11.1, but there might still be bugs.

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Having used several SuSE and Mandriva rpms on my Fedora systems over the years, my conclusion is that sometimes they work, sometimes they don't work even though all of the required dependencies are present but those dependencies are packaged in an rpm file with a name that is different from the Fedora rpm name, and sometimes they don't work because even though the required dependent rpms appear to be present, the Fedora package might be missing something present in the SuSE or Mandriva package. Bottom line: YMMV

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It depends on just WHAT it is
there are a few games that have no dependencies that would work
Then there are some font rpm's

but most will not work well

some would some will not

but if you MUST then use the src.rpm and rebuild the fedora src.rpm on SUSE

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