Suse Studio provides a free online tool that allows you to create your own customized Linux distributions. Read on to see how it works, and what it can do for you.
Variety is the spice of life when it comes to Linux. You can choose from Gnome, KDE or one of the more popular lightweight window managers. You’ll get a selection of multimedia applications and codecs. You might get OpenOffice.org or KOffice. Maybe you’ll get some developer tools. For those starting out with Linux most of the distributions make reasonable assumptions about what you need, while keeping the OS on a CD. But administrators looking to build a custom Linux image for deployment have had to spend many hours downloading packages, customising scripts and building virtual machines.
Suse Studio aims to change all that by providing an online tool that allows you to create your own custom Linux distribution with a simple point and click interface. You start with base template, selecting a preconfigured OpenSuse or Suse Enterprise base to customise. You get a good selection of templates, including minimal, KDE, Gnome, IceWM or text only bases. You then select between 32 or 64 bit builds, give your distribution a name and move on to the customisation.
Suse Studio allows you to select which packages will be installed with your new distribution, allowing you to select from the Suse repository, and giving you the option of adding additional respositories. You can even point Suse Studio to online archive files to be extracted and added to your distribution.
You also have the opportunity to configure a few standard options, like users, startup runlevel, networking, auto login, firewall, background images and more. More complex customisation can be done via scripts to be run at the end of the build process, but the options provided by the Suse Studio interface allow for the most common options to be specified.
Suse Studio can build your distribution to a number of formats including ISO, VMware, Virtual Box, Xen image and USB/Hard disk image. You then simply click the build button and your distribution is built for you, on the Suse Studio servers.
The whole process is very similar to the sort of process you would go through to install a standard distribution on your own PC. The interface is well laid out, and the process is quite intuitive. Anyone who has installed Linux can use Suse Studio to build their own personalised distribution in a matter of minutes.
The best feature of Suse Studio is Testdrive, where you can boot a live copy your new distribution on the Suse Studio servers and get remote access to it. This way you can customise and test your build without having to download it every time. It makes fine tuning your custom distribution a breeze. You can also use the Testdrive feature to boot your distribution and modify files for inclusion back into the build. This is great for those final touches like adding desktop icons or configuring application defaults that would be torturous to do with scripts.
Suse Studio is an excellent tool for anyone who wants to build their own Linux distribution. The online environment is comprehensive and doesn't require any effort on your part to use. You can be using your own distribution in minutes with Testdrive, and can have tested, built and downloaded your distribution in a fraction of the time it would take you to setup the necessary environment yourself.
Linux Mint 7 Review
Linux Mint 7 is the latest incarnation of the Ubuntu based distribution. Read on to find out why it might just displace Windows as my primary OS.