I just formatted and installed SUSE 10 with KDE. The speakers work fine but for some reason I cant play any media. I tried to install mplayer and VLC player but I could not understand a lot of the tutorials on the net. I am so confused. If anyone here knows how to enable videos and sound files with the correct “dependencies“ whatever the hell that means, it would help me out a lot. I downloaded some codec files but I have no idea where to put them. Also here are some errors I get:

(mplayer)
warning: MPlayer-1.0pre7try3-4.i586.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 5f6842a4
error: Failed dependencies:
w32codec-all is needed by MPlayer-1.0pre7try3-4
libdirectfb-0.9.so.24 is needed by MPlayer-1.0pre7try3-4
libdv.so.4 is needed by MPlayer-1.0pre7try3-4
libgssapi.so.1 is needed by MPlayer-1.0pre7try3-4
libldap-2.3.so.0 is needed by MPlayer-1.0pre7try3-4
liblirc_client.so.0 is needed by MPlayer-1.0pre7try3-4
libmad.so.0 is needed by MPlayer-1.0pre7try3-4
libmp3lame.so.0 is needed by MPlayer-1.0pre7try3-4
libtheora.so.0(libtheora.so.1.0) is needed by MPlayer-1.0pre7try3-4
libx264.so.45 is needed by MPlayer-1.0pre7try3-4
libxvidcore.so.4 is needed by Mplayer-1.0pre7try3-4


-----------------------

(VLC)
checking build system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking host system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking target system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for gawk... gawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... no
checking for gcc... no
checking for cc... no
checking for cc... no
checking for cl... no
configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH


I know most of you probably think these are stupid questions but I really don't know how to fix this.

oh dear, I don't know where to begin.

First, you need to install all of the development packages that came with your distro, gcc, automake, etc. This will allow you to compile/install new software on your linux system. Read your distro documentation on how to install packages.

While your at it, make sure you have all of the sound related packages installed too, mainly alsa. (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture)

Once you have installed alsa and any related sound packages, test to see if you have sound working by using a program that came with your distro. You don't want to over complicate things when you are trying to debug a problem. Using an incorrectly installed program may lead you to wrong ideas as to what's causing the problem.

Still no sound?

Make sure your kernel is configured correctly to support your hardware. Let me know if you need help with this.

If all of the steps above were done, you should now have sound. If you still don't, let me know and we'll go from there.


You will not need any extra programs to run most types of media. If you want to run any WMV, ASF, or any other pain in the but codecs, then you will need to install MPlayer correctly by following the directions on their website, and then reading the included README file that comes swith it. The basic process is:

1) download/install the 'all-codec' package from Mplayer website
2) download/install Mplayer skins
3) download/install Mplayer fonts
4) download/install mplayer source (instructions for compiling in README)
usually you can just do this with './configure' and then 'make install' while in the Mplayer source directory


Let me know if you have any specific questions on any of these steps.

regards,
...drkstr

Are you familiar with yast? I'm not familiar with SUSE, but I believe yast is designed to install packages while taking care of any dependencies that you need.

Thanks for your help drkstr and dubya. Everything works now. I have learned so much in just 2 days, holy crap!!! I really don't need windows anymore.

vlc is great but may not play all file formats
you may want to download some extra codecs from mplayer.hq

Go to the OpenSuSE web site and look at how to add and update from the Packman repository.

Just, a quick check but what kind of media did u install SUSE 10 off coz i understand some poeple hav been having problems with limted codecs of the CD install media and the novell do not wish to adress this because there is no real demand for CD installs as most peeps have a DVD drive.............................................

On another note what kind of media d u want to play is it just MP3's & AVI's?

The OSS version of SuSe does not come with support for mp3, there for sound will not play from avi's with mp3 audio, this is because mp3, or the lame decoder, is not open source, it is owned by fraunhoffer, spelling sorry, and is available freely for learning purposes. Also in 10.0 off the cd/dvd media the version off Kaffeine the media player is also 'not working', it is best to get the lastest version from packman