[ale] installing suse packages

[John Wells]

I'm a suse newbie, and feeling like a fish out of water this morning.

I ran a minimal install, but am now struggling to find common packages I need.  I installed apt-rpm (my lifesaver on Red Hat), but it seems to only support a very limited set of packages for Suse.

For example, I'm a big slocate user, but I can't seem to find an slocate package under either the apt repository or an official ftp repository.

patch is another tool that doesn't seem to be installed by default under Suse minimal, yet again, can't find it under the apt repository or under the ftp dirs.

Am I missing something here?  I only had the first Suse cd and it got me this far, but I need an easy way  of installing other software.  Is there a way to cause yast2 to look to the web rather than via a cd when installing new software?

If anyone can point me in the right direction, I'd really appreciate it!

Thanks,
John