[Hampshire] Installation Packages

I have got practically all my Linux experience from Ubuntu/Debian. A
few months ago I looked at OpenErp and simply installed it on Ubuntu in
a few minutes with Synaptic so my memories of installation were "dead
easy". I tried to install it on OpenSuse 11.0, (my first encounter) and
thought that I would just have to work out how to use Yast.
Unfortunately half a dozen python packages were not available from the
repositories. I found a couple on the "rpm.pbone.net" rpm search site
but there are still some outstanding.
Should I be looking at alien or installing from source. I would like to
do as good a job as possible so that it can be maintained properly in
the future.
Can anybody advise?

Thanks

Roger