After about five months of waiting, I got invited to Suse Studio Alpha. If you don’t know what Suse Studio is, and you are interested to know what it is, (congratulations, you are part of a very small sample set) it’s this:
Suse Studio as far as I used it, is a tool to help you build Ready-to-deploy variant of the opensuse 11.1 distribution. The only catch is that you can have as many or as few packages as required. This allows you to build very specialized “appliances”.
If I wanted to make a distribution catering specifically to multimedia based packages, it’s a throwaway task. You go to the website, add packages from their intuitive web2.0-ish application, and click build. Ten minutes later, a spanking new application is ready for your usage.
I see several use cases of this:
- A power user who also uses opensuse can make a distribution perfectly catering to his/her taste.
- Perfect for deploying specialized tools in offices, etc. I can make a appliance catered specifically for java development(and later, stab my head with a butter knife), and deploy it on thousands of computers around.
- Many more, I’m not going to elucidate here.
If you are truly interested in finding out how it works, you can see the screencast over here.
But here’s my two free-as-in-beer cents on the tool.
- Oh god! How did they even manage to build that thing. It’s mind boggling. And they made it a web application. Holy shit! It builds an ISO while you sip coffee! The only thing that can make it better if it can automatically do all your work, write a few research papers for you and store them on the image so it’ll be on your desktop when you start using it.
- Will this convince me to move out of my long-term relationship with debian/ubuntu? Probably not.
- Will this convince me to build the most badass distro, and waste an evening trying it out when I should be doing something productive? Heck yeah!
- While there’s no point in this for me, there’s no doubt that a lot of people will find this really useful to distribute customized applications.
You can look at a screenshot of how it works for me. I was building an appliance with lots of development packages. Finding packages are realy easy with the feature of “patterns”. It’s sort of like groups of packages, like “C++ Development” which do not deserve their own category yet.
I would love to see a tool like this for debian. I’m pretty sure it won’t be much harder than suse’s tool to build. The clock counts down before the open-source hippies ruin a great tool’s reputation claiming that the server-side code is proprietary, despite knowing that it runs on server farms and took a really long time to get running.
Rest assured, this is an awesome product which will make a big impact and not just a novellty(the puns!!! someone make them stop).
Thanks for the nice review of SUSE Studio. We’ve worked really hard on it — but there’s plenty of great new features coming down the pipe, so please keep checking in
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If you have any suggestions to improve it, please let us know!
A tool like this is a definite boon to those trying to outfit a large, distributed organization with a consistent Linux implementation. For Debian, you might try UCK, which is said to work with Debian as well as Ubuntu.
Hello! I just wanted to say that, you forgot to say that even newbies can use this tool
And It will, most likely, strengthen the Linux community when It’s released to the public.. I think.. ^^
Nat, Thanks for a great product, you guys release some awesome stuff for free. I’ll send any suggestions and feedback through the application. (Thank you for the comment, we don’t get celebrities down here often)
Rambo: UCK is nice, with squash-fs generation the last time I checked, but to make it a web application that fetches packages and builds a new operating system is really something.
Viktor: I can only hope that it would encourage more people to try out linux to be able to tailormake their distro. I just hope that good interoperability comes soon so the distro-wars can end.