[packman] I give up, how do you use additional suse rpms

[leadfoot at lizard.com]

Hello,

Two days ago I learned a streaming station I listen to is changing over
to AAC, from MP3, and that I have only a couple of days left to figure
out how to play AAC files.  I figured it would be easy, add the guru and
packman rpm paths to YaST, and load a few extra packages.  Not so.

I can't find anything stating that packman and guru packages work OK
together.  Can I mix them or not?  In the RH world some packager's rpms
can be mixed, others can not, but they tell you which don't mix.

I found GPG keys but adding them only made YaST complain about package
sources not matching something.  I removed the GPG keys, and YaST stopped
complaining.

YaST often hangs during the rpm file downloads.  It never seems to restart
a hung file download, it will sit there doing nothing for hours, a huge
waste of time.

It needs an better file download method, like 'wget -c -t 0 -T 120 URL',
which I use to download ISOs, it never gives up.  Worse yet, once started
I can not abort a hung YaST download, because it doesn't respond to the
abort button.  You can press it all you want, but it doesn't do anything.

Plus, the normal KDE X (kill window) button has no effect either.  Getting
rid of the hung YaST install screen requires using "su -c 'killall y2base'",
not a command every user will know about.  Using kill also wipes out all
of your package choices, which is another huge waste of time.

Is there anyway to make the YaST install software screen retry hung file
downloads?  During On-line updates the abort button works, it's not smart
enough to restart the download on its own, but at least there's a way to
do it with killing the whole process and starting all over again.  This
YaST file download problem happens on both 9.2 and 9.3 systems.

I finally get faad2-xmms-plugin-2.0-0.pm.8 installed on a 9.2 systems,
without YaST errors, but it doesn't work.  Starting xmms on the command
line (SUSE 9.2) produces this error:
"/usr/lib/xmms/Input/libmp4.so: undefined symbol: MP4GetTrackAudioType"

I found one of the libmp4.* file didn't have exec perm bits, so I added
them, but that doesn't fix the problem either.  What's wrong?  Two days
of fighting with YaST hangs, and it still doesn't work.  I give up.

On my RH/CentOS boxes, yum/yumex with rpmforge rpms/keys simply worked.
Yum restarts hung downloads, uses GPG keys and just works.

Thanks,

Mark