Custom Linux, fast & simple
Build an appliance — or your own custom Linux distro — with a few mouse clicks. Customize it to your heart's content, and share it with the world!
-- Taken from the home page located at: http://susestudio.com/ (Invite only at this current writing, but you can request an invite right from the site and most likely get it, I mean, they gave me one xD ).
So what is this SUSE Studio? It's a platform to construct your own custom Linux Distribution using community, build, and personal RPM repositories, and various options within the many menu's to add your own custom scripts upon system boot. You can control your system in many ways, customize it with your own grub splash screens, boot splash screens and others. There is some bugs here and there, but nothing a few good hacks can't fix.
The interfaces are nice and clean, run smooth, and also run some of the tasks from within your browsers memory to help keep things fast for the server.
The best part of this software, has got to be that they include an API over HTTP for programmatic access information about appliances and allow execution of actions! Yes, you can offer your own custom build access for your friends or clients on your own server (with API security access).
After you've finished building your distro, you can have it made into an iso format, a raw image format for use with "dd", a vmware image, or a xen guest appliance. But before you download your medium of choice, you can also run it remotely using a tool they call TestDrive, so there is no need to download your medium without knowing for sure if its working or not!
They have a lot of documentation and have both an IRC channel and a forum for users who need more information about the concepts inside the sites tools and/or scripts.
I hope that you all find this as fun and cool as I have. Please spread the word. Another thing, they allow quite a few different systems in their first step for creation:
OpenSUSE 11.2 & SUSE Linux Enterprise 11(requires a valid Novell account and Authorization key!)
They do have many templates to choose from and you can use a trial key from novell evaluation downloads that are good for 60 days of updates before you are asked to pay!
Thanks for reading this and I hope you at least go check into this, its absolutely awesome and I know many will love it!
