1..
Don't use realplayer for music. There are lots of superior applications..
Sound is a sticking point for Linux. Since your using Suse your probably using KDE. KDE uses artsd as a sound manager for the desktop. If you choose a KDE application that uses artsd then you can go into the kde control panel and fiddle around with the artsd settings. Buy giving it a longer delay/more buffers/periods you can increase the sound latency and reduce the tendancy to skip.
If you end up finding a app that doesn't use artsd to play music and you want to stop sound skipping altogether you can use 'nice' to give the sound program elevated priority.
Nice range goes from -20 to 19. The more unnice something is, the more the OS favors it. By default, all the proccesses that you start as the user use the niceness level of 0. So if you have a mp3 music do-dad that your using you can go, from a unix shell (like your x terminal):
go
ps aux | grep -i <progname>
and find out the PID number of the proccess. Also there are GUI tools that can show you this.
So for realplayer 10 you can try:
ps aux | grep -i real
and hopefully that will give a result. The pid number is the number that comes after your username. Different command line options of 'ps' will change the location of the pid number column.
Then you use that PID number and do something like this:
sudo renice -5 18124
So if you want to listen to music for a long time with no skips you can do that.
Also there will probably be GUI apps that will accomplish the same thing (find the pid number of a object and/or changing the priority of a application)
Also it's handy for when your doing things like running a SETI number-crunching program. You can give it a very nice value of 16 or whatnot and then it would only use CPU if no other proccess needs it, so you can leave it running continiously without having any real effect on desktop performance.
But first thing to try is to try something other then Realplayer. There are many options. I don't have any issues with sound skipping, personally, except when restarting X and whatnot. Maybe be something paticular to Suse.
Also check out and make sure that you have your DMA access to your disks turned on. You can use the command line utility 'hdparm' to do this, but Suse may have the ability to have Yast to do it. Unfortunately I am not that familar with Suse.
Buy having DMA access activated you will increase the speed and the efficiency of your disk activity.
2...
Monitors don't realy have 'drivers' per say. In Windows a 'monitor driver' is just a ini text file containing the make and name of the monitor and it's range of usefull horizontal and verticle frequencies.
In Linux it's behavior is controlled by the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. (XF86Config on older systems)...
Now with Suse you can probably configure it thru Yast, but I am used to editing the file directly. (always make a backup copy before editing it.)
In that file you'll find a section that looks like this:
Section "Monitor"
blah
blah
blah
EndSection
Here is mine:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Generic Monitor"
Option "DPMS"
HorizSync 28-49
VertRefresh 43-72
EndSection
The important parts is the HorizSync and VertRefresh entries.
Make sure that those match the specs for your monitor.
Sometimes you'll see that they use the old-fasioned modlines.. I hate those.
But most of this should be configurable thru yast, I beleive.
X will automaticly select acceptable refresh rates based on your resolution.. I don't know of any way to force it to select a refresh rate that you don't like... unfortunately.
3.
There should be.
In Gnome on my System if I right click on the panel and select "add to panel" selection I can pick from a veriaty of little applets.. one of them being 'Show desktop' button.
I don't know about KDE, but I expect that they have something similar. If not aviable by default you can most defiantely find something usefull on the web to add on to it.
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