I know this is probably a huge n00b question but I figured if I don't ask i'll never find out. I noticed the way to download them is with something called like 'cvs' when I tried to d/l though it just opens in Konqueror as a txt file it seems. Please help & thx for any help.

if its a tar or b2z then it may need compiling
the file that you have downloaded! what is its extention?

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ticle&artid=15

Does this mean that the obvious way of starting "YaST" and using the software manager for installing programmes doesn't work ??? If not, then maybe you should take a look at this site?????

Is this not the newbie forum? I obviously posted this question because I didn't know that YaST could install software, be a little nicer next time.

YaST is the default software installer in SUSE.
To install 3rd party software, you'll have to install unofficial RPMs or compile from source. "CVS" is a convenient way of fetching the latest source code, amongst other things.

Maybe you shouldn't be so "sensitive" about _GENUINE_ questions/queries/replies!

That way you might have understood, that I can only presume that _YOU HAD READ THE DOCUMENTATION_ and for reasons unbeknownst to me, that the YaST facility was broken for some reason!

If you take every reply as critical, then you're gonna make your learning curve even steeper than it already will be! Linux can help me do all sorts of stuff, but it can't help me read minds!

Ok, enough of that.

So, YaST (yet another software tool) is normally the way that you'd install software. Beware that the software packages that you try to install are ones that are for your distro (or at least SuSE) - trying to install mandriva or Fedora ones will probably lead you to "dependency hell" hence in the short term it's best/easiest to get SuSE rpms.

If your net connection is working OK, you will probably need to find out about adding software repositories, so that you can access any updates and the latest versions of stuff that you're wanting to install - Sorry, I can't find the instructions that a friend sent me when I was playing at that - when I had Mandriva I could just as easily go to the "easy urpmi" site for instructions on how thats done with Mandy'

So I can only suggest that you read up, in the docs about how to do that with SuSE. Or possibly you could either check out the SuSE forum in the distributions section here at LQ, or look at the link I posted earlier and you may find something there. I seem to recall that all the repositories that I had added, were German located ones, but they seemed to work OK.

I couldn't say if there'll be any closer (geographically) ones now that the "OpenSuSE" project has been kicked off for the next release.

Sorry I can't be of more help, but it's a while since I dumped SuSE, maybe it'll point you in the right direction.

Good luck

regards

John