NTFS-3G

This is the module/app that is needed to enable accessing NTFS partitions.
In Opensuse while I could read these partitions, even the root account was not permitted to write into the partition. That was when I went hunting for ntfs related apps in the app manager.
To my surprise I found that ntfs-3g was already installed, though I have no recollection of installing it. So, probably, it is preinstalled in Opensuse. The other crucial piece of the ntfs family was the ntfs-config package which was the gui to control ntfs-3g's behaviour. Without it, I am sure ntfs-3g could be manipulated from the command line.
With ntfs-config installed, it is much easier to set options about the ntfs partitions in the system, and control which of them have R/W access to it.
In the first instance, ntfs-config would present an error that the ntfs partition was busy and so the modifications could not be made. Since mine was an external drive, plugging the drive into the USB slot would invariably mount the partitions. This was an issue that I found irritating, since there was no way to unmount the partition.
In my case, the partition was loaded under /media/New Volume which could be accessed from the file manager. With the partition editor, I could not unmount the parition, something that I frequently did in PCLinux. So under the command prompt, I tried running the umount /media/New Volume command, and got an error that "media/New"was not found. Apparently the space in the loaded name was the issue, which is quite strange. Looking at the partition tool found that "New Volume" was shown as "New\40%Volume", but replacing this in the umount command also did not work.

With ntfs-config (run this command) I could set the mount location manually quite easily. The mount option had to be "forced" since otherwise it would give an error.

The nag that remains is that I need to do this everytime the system is booted and also everytime the drive is plugged it. For some reason, Opensuse reverts to the older "New Volume" nomenclature eventhough the fstab entries are modified, and this time I get a permission denied message which prevented even viewing the contents.