i am trying to be happy with linux. tried ubuntu for many months, but too many unresolved issues. (i have been stuck at 640x480 for the last 3 weeks)

i decided to switch to opensuse.
installed it, and of course the default media mplayer wont play anything other than .wav (or so it seems)

tried following the install instructions for mp3 support, but it is telling me i now need to install 400mb of software first.

so here is a simple, yet difficult question.

how do i, in under 2 minutes(the time it takes to run puppy linux which plays mp3s) install mp3 support? with no long drawn out gotta update the entire system type of procedure?

and i know this is an amarok forum, not a linux one, but when will someone make a decent version of linux, which actually works?

(so far i have tried all the *ubuntus, fedora, slackware, gentoo, knoppix[which totally sux] suse, and i am one day away from installing xp, a decent firewall and ignoring linux forever)

I'm not trying to be rude or insulting here, but really, if you've tried that many distros, some of which have a much steeper learning curve than others, and you still haven't got the hang of package management, then maybe linux isn't for you
Alternatively, a quick search of this forum should yield you some tips on which packages you need to install.

i can handle package management. thats not hard at all. i am really just sick of massive amounts of downloads just for somethiing simple like mp3 support. ubuntu gets me mp3 support but only in 640x480. same with all the other deb based distros..

suse looks good, i like it, but i can't get amarok to play mp3's without downloading masses of files for othercrap i dont even want. updates or something.

i apologise if i am ranting. i love linux. just frustrated.

crshbndct,

The problem you are facing with many distros is a legal and not a technical one. Since mp3 playback is covered by software patents in many countries, many distros does not ship mp3 support by default.

For *ubuntu, installing the libxine1-ffmpeg package brings in support for many audio and video formats, including mp3. On OpenSUSE I am not personally aware of the simplest solution, but a quick Google search yielded this page with a "download and run" type thing for setting up multimedia format support on OpenSUSE 11.1 in either Gnome or KDE variants: http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2008/12 ... 1-mp3.html