OpenSuse 13.1 questions.

[BigJoe5434]

hello everyone, been awhile since I been on the Pit, and even longer since I toyed with Linux (never long enough to feel fluent in it)

 

my nephew recently reformatted his laptop with no recovery disc and pretty much screwed his Windows up. instead of purchasing Windows, since he does not use it for anything but media use, decided to go with a Free operating system and that's why im here.

 

downloading the OS right now. I have a few questions. and here they are.

 

1. will the onboard wifi work off the bat or will I have to connect to the internet with RJ45 cord until I get drivers?

2. I will obviously need the NVidia repositories for video, any others I should get for watching movies and listening to music and watching youtube? like Flash?

 

 

here are his intended uses.

 

1. searching the net

2. Netflix

3. youtube videos/music

4. VLC media player

 

any info would be appreciated

[terry1966]

question 1:- no idea some wifi adaptors have the drivers built into the kernel and some don't so you'll just have to install the os and see if your lucky.

 

question 2:- nvidia repo depends on if you have a nvidia graphic card and is not needed otherwise.

you will want to add the packman repo, and the libdvdcss repo.

 

after installing 13.1 and adding those 2 repo's here is a list of things i would search for and install before updating all packages if newer versions available.

 

k3b-codecs

libxine2-codecs

vlc-codecs

w32codecs-all

libdvdcss2

vlc

handbrake-gtk

 

can't think of anything else at the moment, and you should find flash player will automatically be installed.

 

netflix will only work with m$'s silverlight so you will need to follow these instructions to add the repo and install pipelight

then you will be able to watch anything that will only work with the silverlight player.

http://pipelight.net/cms/installation.html

 

depending on site you may need to actually specify which version of silverlight to use.

for example to watch sky online i need to enable silverlight5.0 but for netflix i then need to disable that and enable silverlight (which will use the latest version available currently silverlight 5.1 i believe.) and then disable that and go back to 5.0 again if i want to watch sky again. easy enough to do and full instructions are in the link somewhere.

 

not sure if you need to use the browser agent switcher, but i do anyway and have it set to mac/firefox29 (i do run firefox of course.)

 

can't think of anything else you'd need to install to do everything on your intended uses list.

 

 

you may be able to fix your nephews laptop by using a linux live disk depending on if it has a recovery partition and whether he formatted that as well as the os partition.

so first thing i'd do is use the live cd and see what partitions are on the drive using fdisk, if he's lucky and the restore partition is there, use fdisk to make that partition the active/boot partition and reboot, with luck it should start the recovery process and install windows again for him.

Edited October 17, 2014 by terry1966

[BigJoe5434]

Terry thank you very much. I think my nephew can manage without Netflix on laptop he has an Xbox One so he can watch Netflix from there. The rest will come in handy when I install suse.

[terry1966]

 

installing pipelight is easy enough if he wants to watch netflix on the laptop later anyway, and here's a couple of test links to see if it's working correctly.

 

silverlight version test :- http://www.silverlightversion.com/

 

silverlight animation test :- http://bubblemark.com/silverlight2.html

 

silverlight drm test (think this one only works with silverlight5.0) :- http://web.sldrm.video.msn.com/d1/sldrm.html

 

Edited October 18, 2014 by terry1966