Hi Paul,
4. I installed Thunderbird and it works fine so far. I installed the English SUSE version because I don't like localized operating systems. Same goes for Thunderbird. My mother tongue is German so I tried to additionally install the German language pack for spell checking in Thunderbird because I also write German mails for obvious reasons. The installation went fine and it didn't spit out any error message. But the spell checking preferences do not show the German dictionary and it hence does not do German spell checking. What went wrong?
I think I might know what's wrong with your attempts to install the spelling dictionary in Thunderbird. If you take a look in your Tbird install log file, it might confirm my suspicion: /home/(username)/.thunderbird/(randomid).default/install.log If it shows errors while trying to install the files, then it could be your normal user name is restricted from writing to the target directory: /usr/lib/thunderbird/components/myspell Try running Tbird as root to install the spelling extension. Then switch to your normal user name and restart Tbird. The dictionary selection should show up when composing a message.
5. Oh, before I forget: Up to and including SUSE 10.0 YOU showed a variety of update sites. Now there's only the installation DVD and the location ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/update/10.1/. Since this can possibly be slow at times or unavailable, are there any mirror sites I can add to the list? Also, sorry, that's more than four questions. ;-)
I renumbered your question to 5. ;-D Guru's version of Smart package manager has a wide variety of mirrors included. Here's the output for the SUSE 10.1 YOU mirrors: # smart mirror --show | grep suse/update/10.1 ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/update/10.1/ http://ftp.belnet.be/mirrors/ftp.suse.com/suse/update/10.1/ http://ftp.skynet.be/pub/ftp.suse.com/suse/update/10.1/ http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/ftp.suse.com/suse/update/10.1/ ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/suse/suse/update/10.1/ ftp://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/update/10.1/ - Brett