Nikos

yes: you are correct. Under KDE the Thinkpad buttons work just fine. I should have been more specific and noted that I was under Gnome at the time. What I did not say then was the broader observation that it seems like KDE is more mature under openSUSE than Gnome. That makes sense to some degree, since KDE was the preferred interface for SUSE for years, till they bought Ximian. And there was all that kicking a while back about them moving to only a Gnome interface, and the KDE community got riled, and then it turned out both KDE and Gnome ewre going to be supported... fast forward to now, and it seems like KDE is still the better intgrated into SUSE desktop manager. The opposite of Fedora, where Gnome seems to be a bit more tested. My personal experience anyway.

I got around to re-linking the libgcc and libpng as noted in the main post's link. VMware works fine under Gnome or KDE now. Mark that one off.