After installing OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, the sound (audio codecs) and SAMBA (file sharing) need to be configured next. Note that setting up a SAMBA server is only important if you have multiple computers and need to share files over the network. First things first.
OpenSUSE Audio Codec installation
By default, OpenSUSE does not include audio codecs because they are proprietary and including them is a bit of a grey area. The good news is that they can be added by copy/pasting the following commands into the terminal.
Disclaimer! I am providing the steps here as I use them. Evaluate the commands and proceed if you know what you are doing. I do not assume any responsibility if you mess up your system!
Altaugh YAST can add the audio codecs, I rather prefer the terminal bacause it’s faster. The first command adds the repo (repository) and the other commands are hopefully self explanatory. Here they are:
sudo zypper addrepo --refresh --priority 90 https://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/packman/suse/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/packman.repo
sudo zypper refresh
sudo zypper dist-upgrade --from packman --allow-downgrade --allow-vendor-change
sudo zypper install --from packman ffmpeg gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-libav gstreamer-plugins-ugly libavcodec58 libavdevice58 libavfilter7 libavformat58 libavresample4 libavutil56 vlc-codecsThat’s it! Once all four commands have been issued, you can enjoy audio and video content as you’d expect. Next, we’ll tackle network file sharing.
SAMBA setup and configuration
To get SAMBA up and running, I first open YAST > Firewall and set the zone from default to home. Feel free to check out all the applications which can pass trough the firewall when the home profile is chosen. Basically, you get SAMBA, SSH and web browsing. That’s it and definitely all you want.
After the firewall profile is set to home (or what ever you find more useful for your particular setup), click on YAST > Samba Server. From there, you could set the host name but it’s easier to skip that step and just accept the defaults which will make a users home directory accessible to other computers on the network.
Before SAMBA gives us access to the files, we need to create a samba user. Again, this is fast and easy when performed from the terminal. Here is the command.
*Just change the “username” for the actual account name you want to use.
sudo smbpasswd -a *username
Enter the root password and then the samba user password twice.
Hint! It’s OK to use the same Samba user name as the user name. This goes for all machines but only if you are the only user. If others are using the network, then everyone needs their own name and password.
Now, with the Samba user added, it’s time to restart the Samba server and service like so:
systemctl restart smb
systemctl restart nmb
Now the home directories from the computer which had the above steps performed will be visible from any computer on the network. If not, restart but I didn’t have to because it worked right away.
Bonus Software: SublimeText3
My text editor of choice is SublimeText3. Since it’s not available in the OpenSUSE repos, I’ll provide the steps to install it. Again, if you don’t need a text editor, then skip installing SublimeText3. To install it, copy/paste these three commands into the terminal:
sudo rpm -v --import https://download.sublimetext.com/sublimehq-rpm-pub.gpg
sudo zypper addrepo -g -f https://download.sublimetext.com/rpm/stable/x86_64/sublime-text.repo
sudo zypper install sublime-textThat’s it. Now you should create a test.txt document on your desktop. Then right click and select “Open with other application”. Select SublimeText3 and check the “Use as default for this kind of file”. From now on, all .txt files will automatically open with SublimeText3.
One of the major advantages of using SublimeText3 is that any system files can easily be edited and saved. SublimeText3 is much nicer to use than Vim but Vim or Nano are OK too.
I will document the NVIDIA driver install as well as theming XFCE in a separate post. Thank you for reading.