Michael Dolan Dot Com

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

OpenSUSE 10.1 3rd Party Repositories

Just thought I’d post this for any new OpenSUSE users (this is all basically the same for SLES too). I come from a Gentoo background where just about anything/everything I could imagine was available in the public portage tree (or that … other rumored… tree). With OpenSUSE, things are a bit different. My fairly educated guess is that there are legal reasons certain packages such as win32codecs are not included… so, how do we get these packages without compiling them individually? OpenSUSE relies upon YaST for just about everything. One piece is that YaST stores the location of the installation source.

Open YaST. Then under the Software menu option, you will see “installation sources”, and in the windows that appears, you will see a dropdown for “Add..” Here you can add a new install source location.

Now on this OpenSUSE webpage you will see a list of external package repositories. Just add one to your installation sources and now when you search for a package (e.g. win32codecs) you will be able to pull it down from an external repository.