Multimedia in SUSE 10.1

As for all major Linux distributions SUSE comes with almost no support for multimedia. At least mp3 playback is possible via Real Player or amaroK if you install “amarok-helix” and choose it as playback engine for amaroK. If mp3 support is all you want, you’re set! But I like to go a little further here.

Almost all you need for this purpose Packman has it! Just add this repository to smart. If you added Packman with the default settings you will get a bunch of new packages the next time you do a smart update/upgrade replacing the one’s from SUSE by Packman’s. There’s nothing wrong with this, but I like to stay closer with SUSE. So, when adding the Packman repository to smart I selected “-10” as priority. This way, I can manually choose which packages from Packman I’d like to install.

If you followed the “-10 priority”-part you now need to install the packages manually. Open the smart-gui and search for the following packages and mark them for installation/removal (packages by Packman have “pm” in their name):

INSTALL:

• libxine1 (from Packman)
• xine-ui (from Packman)
• xine-skins (from Packman)
• speex (for amd64: both, the x86_64 and i686 from Packman)
• xmms (from Packman)
• xmms-lib (from Packman)
• faad2-xmms-plugin (from Packman)
• xmms-mac (from Packman)
• xmms-shn (from Packman)

REMOVE:

• speex-32bit (from SUSE)
• xmms-plugins (from SUSE)

Once those packages and their dependencies are installed you should be able to listen to mp3’s and watch most movie formats - with the exception of DVDs… I’ll cover that later, as this is a little tricky and in some countries not even legal.