Fixing Totem error ("Missing plugings") when playing vids in openSUSE Leap

Totem, the default video player for the GNOME 3 desktop has always been a difficult beast to tame when I am using openSUSE. My primary work machine runs openSUSE Leap and as predicted, Totem isn't running - no matter what manner of gstreamer plugins added/removed or removing the ~/.cache/gstreamer-1.0 directory nothing works.

Posting in the openSUSE group in FB got me a reply from a gentleman (https://www.facebook.com/NMMoendjen?fref=ufi) who suggested that I should install xine. That jigged my memory and I recalled installing the w32codecs package to make Totem work. Did a zypper search but couldn't find w32codec package even in the Packman repo for Leap.

Going through OBS, a preliminary search yielded w32codec packages for Tumbleweed and 13.x. Not Good! I trawled through the repository manually it yielded me the YMP for it at http://software.opensuse.org/ymp/home:vadimuzzz/openSUSE_42.1/w32codecs.ymp.

If you have trouble installing the package from 1-Click Install, download the package and use zypper to manually install it. Just ignore the "Problem: nothing provides libstdc++.so.5 needed by w32codecs-1.0-20110133.1.x86_64" error message.

Totem is alive again.....

Fixing Totem error ("Missing plugings") when playing vids in openSUSE Leap

Totem, the default video player for the GNOME 3 desktop has always been a difficult beast to tame when I am using openSUSE. My primary work machine runs openSUSE Leap and as predicted, Totem isn't running - no matter what manner of gstreamer plugins added/removed or removing the ~/.cache/gstreamer-1.0 directory nothing works.

Posting in the openSUSE group in FB got me a reply from a gentleman (https://www.facebook.com/NMMoendjen?fref=ufi) who suggested that I should install xine. That jigged my memory and I recalled installing the w32codecs package to make Totem work. Did a zypper search but couldn't find w32codec package even in the Packman repo for Leap.

Going through OBS, a preliminary search yielded w32codec packages for Tumbleweed and 13.x. Not Good! I trawled through the repository manually it yielded me the YMP for it at http://software.opensuse.org/ymp/home:vadimuzzz/openSUSE_42.1/w32codecs.ymp.

If you have trouble installing the package from 1-Click Install, download the package and use zypper to manually install it. Just ignore the "Problem: nothing provides libstdc++.so.5 needed by w32codecs-1.0-20110133.1.x86_64" error message.

Totem is alive again.....

Running LibreOffice 5.2 beta on openSUSE Leap 42.1

LibreOffice to me is an indispensible tool. I have used it professionally, even in Windows, since the pre-OpenOffice 1.0 days; when I typed my final paper for my Bachelor's programme. My supervisor was a kindly Englishman that was intrigued that a free office suite of some quality was available at no cost running on the nascent Linux platform.

Since then, I have used LibreOffice for my all my documentation, creating presentation slides and even diagramming needs that I can honetly say that I am no longer be considered productive with the conventional MS Office.

SUSE has always played a crucial rule ("the rebel ringleader") in making LibreOffice into the awesome suite it is today, from the days of rebellion against the draconian Sun contributor licensing and forking OpenOffice into the go-oo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo) project as a result and later on to collaborating with Microsoft to create an "Enterprise version of OpenOffice" named Novell OpenOffice and later to bring about the birth of The Document Foundation and consequently LibreOffice.

The latest version of LibreOffice is at 5.1.4 downloadable from the LibreOffice site - but for some of us, the "stable" version is the same as the "stale" version - the inner geek in me demands to have the latest incarnation of LibreOffice running on my system (there is a practical reason for this; as I often need to work with MS Office documents, a newer version oftens bring better compatibility with MS Office documents) .

To get the latest unstable/beta version or in SUSE/openSUSE  parlance, Factory version; running on openSUSE Leap - you can add it via the CLI:

# zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/LibreOffice:/Factory/openSUSE_42.1/ LO_Factory

# zypper ref LO_Factory

# zypper dup --from LO_Factory

And there you go - enjoy the freshest from LibreOffice.