I have been trying to switch to Linux for about a month, tried about 10 distros, I settled on SUSE because it discovered and configured all my hardware flawlessly.

The next problem, common to all distros was multimedia support, I wanted to view streaming video online. I tried to install several media players with YAST, but I kept falling into dependancy hell.

Finally I got smart, I installed APT, went to the shell typed apt-get mplayer, to my amasement APT solved all dependency issues with no input from me.

Moral of the story is don't be scared of the command line, it's where the real power lies.

ahp123

averatec 3150 laptop
athelon xp-m 1600
640 ram
40 gig hd

Since you have SuSE, you could have also installed it via YAST. But congrats anyway

At least you got things going, but as XavierP pointed out, I would have expected YaST to have been able to resolve the dependency problems you were having as it would all be running of the SuSE repositories, unless you were using different sources or had manually updated some package/libraries.

Have fun with your system though! Glad you've found the command line just as powerful, or more so, than flashy gui's!

Thanks for the feedback. For some reason YAST wouldn't resolve the dependencies. I kept giving me a huge list of needed/unavailable packages. Apt worked the first try. Maybe YAST didn't have the right sources. But APT worked out of the box, without adding additional sources, just the default ones.

Thanks again.

I am using apt or synaptic to install new packages and update/upgrade my system. I have never had problems. I also have automatic updates with yast, which is also doing its "job" well.

I am running SUSE 10.0 and all my players - Kaffeine, xine, Mplayer are playing also DVDs without problems.

Hey ahp123, whatever works works.
I installed MPlayer from the Packman site using "rpm -i" with only a couple failures I had to follow up on.
You are right about the command line. The only trouble with it is that it is sometimes necessary to rediscover the attitude of not letting it scare you whenever you enter uncharted waters.