[Novices] I am very new at this so...

[Bruce Smith]

> > I am running Suse 10 on a HP zd7058cl laptop and I have been trying to get the 
> > following working to no avail....
> > 1.  BCM4306 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (talking to a Lynksis 802.11B 
> > Wireless Router)
> 
> This is what lspci reports the device as?

Also, does the wireless NIC show up in YAST -> Network Card?
If so, what does it say?

Not all 802.11g cards are supported _native_ in Linux.
But that can usually be worked around by using the ndiswrapper Linux
package and the Windows driver for the card (which a quick google search
seems to imply for your model laptop).  NDISwrapper can sometimes be
difficult to get working (but it can't hurt to try).  If you want easy,
buy a cheap PCMCIA 802.11b that is supported natively in Linux.

> > Apparently Suse has no clue just what type of Controller is installed.  I have 
> > tried everything in YAST and downloaded software...nothing works.
> > 2.  My installed DVD Player to play all the movies (encrypted and 
> > nonencrypted) in my collection.  Right now it plays no movies of any kind 
> > using xine or kaffine.  I know about the licensing problem and I know there 
> > is a solution out there but I cannot get the downloaded stuff (MPlayer) to 
> > work either.
> 
> What problems have you encountered installing MPlayer?  Have you tried
> adding the pacman install source to Yast and installing it that way?
> Was totally painless for me and it plays *everything*.  It is
> frustrating that the whole multimedia thing is still such a mess.

I recently posted a message on a KLUG list (members?) about how to
install mplayer on SuSE 10.0 using YAST.

For encrypted DVD's, you may also need the "libdvdcss2" package, which
is not legal to for SuSE to distribute, but can be downloaded and
installed easily.

 - BS