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SuSE Linux

SUSE Studio — Linux Customization For the Masses 126

Posted by kdawson from the rolling-your-own dept.
apokryphos writes "Novell just released the first alpha of SUSE Studio (screencast), which provides an easy way to customize your own Linux distribution with the software and configuration you want. Among other things, you can spin a Live CD, a USB image, or create a VMware image. It builds upon the already established openSUSE Build Service and KIWI imaging system."
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SUSE Studio — Linux Customization For the Masses More

SUSE Studio — Linux Customization For the Masses

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  • Wasn't this a Phil Collins song? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Majik Sheff ( 930627 ) on Monday January 26, 2009 @07:22PM (#26615589) Journal

    SUSE SUSE Studio

  • Yes (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26, 2009 @07:23PM (#26615599)

    For very small values of masses.

    • Re:Yes (Score:4, Funny)

      by dimeglio ( 456244 ) on Monday January 26, 2009 @09:08PM (#26616515)

      We can now spam distrowatch with a gazillion custom versions!

  • Correct screencast link... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zapotek ( 1032314 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {soksal.sosat}> on Monday January 26, 2009 @07:23PM (#26615603)
    ...here [suse.com].

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Honestly, what the fuck. We already know the "editors" don't read the articles, but is it too much to ask to verify the links?!?! Sadly, I think the answer is "yes". At this point in time, I see no reason why every single "editor" couldn't be replaced by a simple script.

      • Re:Correct screencast link... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26, 2009 @07:39PM (#26615747)
        Hey! I wrote all those scripts myself ! I apologize for KDawson, I wrote that one when I was nodding off on heroin.

        -- Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Oh crap, the CmdrTaco script is now self-aware and self-replicating.

      • Re:Correct screencast link... (Score:4, Funny)

        by Mish ( 50810 ) on Monday January 26, 2009 @09:56PM (#26616949)
        I put this script together a while back to help me relive the days of quality slashdot content.

        curl --silent http://feeds.digg.com/digg/container/technology/popular.rss http://feeds.digg.com/digg/container/science/popular.rss http://feeds.digg.com/digg/container/gaming/popular.rss | grep -e "<title>digg.com: Stories" -e "<link>http://feeds.digg.com" | sed -e '/<title>digg.com/s//slashdot.org/g' -e '/<\/title>/s///g' -e '/<link>/s///g' -e '/<\/link>/s///g'

        Yes, I'm kidding, Yes, it works.

  • Bad link in summary (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    susestudio.com [susestudio.com]

  • Actual screencast URL (Score:5, Informative)

    by moonbender ( 547943 ) <moonbender AT gmail DOT com> on Monday January 26, 2009 @07:32PM (#26615671)

    Actually, the screencast is at http://studio.suse.com/ [suse.com], not suse.studio.com, which is an adfarm that just struck gold.

  • Linux customization for the masses?

    "Well, I for one resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me--the free man and woman of this country--as 'the masses.'"
    --Ronald Reagan, in his speech on behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater, October 27, 1964.

    The free users of free software shouldn't be called "the masses" either.

  • OpenSuSE/SLES/SLED are our preferred distros around here for our POS and ERP systems just because it was a fluke that it was the first distro to install correctly on the test/development machines without having to hunt down drivers or getting a kernel panic. But this will make creating a disc image for our Point of Sales systems extremely easy and I'm glad to see it.

  • This would be a great tool if it works out. Hopefully it will be GPL and can be adapted to other distros. Very forward thinking on SUSE's part.

    • Re:An Excellent Idea (Score:4, Interesting)

      by apokryphos ( 869208 ) on Monday January 26, 2009 @08:59PM (#26616433) Homepage
      Indeed, it is actually designed to be friendly for other distributions as well. Both the build service and KIWI (both GPL) intentionally have generic designs so that you can both build packages for other distributions, and build customisable versions of other distributions, too. It's a really nice thing: when a distribution goes out of their way to ensure that others can benefit from the tools as well.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by do_kev ( 1086225 )

        Indeed, it is actually designed to be friendly for other distributions as well. Both the build service and KIWI (both GPL) intentionally have generic designs so that you can both build packages for other distributions, and build customisable versions of other distributions, too. It's a really nice thing: when a distribution goes out of their way to ensure that others can benefit from the tools as well.

        Or, to be cynical, perhaps so that they wouldn't have to rewrite it if they wanted to do any major overhauls of suse?

        • Yeah, you know how likely it is that SUSE will switch to the Debian packaging system... There's no way to get around it: I know for a fact that they've designed them in this way because developers like being able to get wide collaboration and benefiting the most amount of people.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • OpenID (Score:3, Interesting)

    by phantomcircuit ( 938963 ) on Monday January 26, 2009 @08:24PM (#26616125) Homepage
    Finally someone actually using OpenID as a consumer.

  • "Mass customization" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by techno-vampire ( 666512 ) on Monday January 26, 2009 @08:48PM (#26616335) Homepage
    In TFA, Matthew Richards is quoted as saying, "We didn't achieve mass customization of cars until Ford thought up the assembly line." No, Mr. Richards, that's not what Ford's assembly line achieved. It achieved mass production of essentially identical cars. That's why, for many years, you could buy a Ford in any color you wanted, as long as you wanted black. Similarly, you can use this software to produce any custom Linux you want, as long as you want it based on Open SuSe.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mgblst ( 80109 )

      6. Any Color As Long As It's Black - The myth that the Model T only came in black probably comes from the reality that almost 12 million of the 15 million total Model Ts were black. But, in the early and late years of Model T production, the car was produced in many different colors, including blue, red, green and grey. Oddly, many these hues were so dark they were hardly discernable from black, another reason the myth lives on.

      http://www.seriouswheels.com/cars/def/top-Ford-Model-T-Centennial.htm [seriouswheels.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by horza ( 87255 )

        The supposed myth comes directly from a quote by Henry Ford. In fact it appears there was a time where you could only buy a Model T in black, from the point the assembly line was developed, so it's not really a myth.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford:
        "By 1918, half of all cars in America were Model T's. However, it was a monolithic block; as Ford wrote in his autobiography, "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black". Until the development of the assembly line,

  • So can I get a Gnome install without Gnibbles?

    • So can I get a Gnome install without Gnibbles?

      Do you really care about Gnibbles that much? Delete the binary & remove it from your menu.

      Remember - one mans crapware is another man's treasure. Its only 60k, so why remove it?

    • You don't need to install it with a normal (DVD) openSUSE gnome install either. There's a lot more power than meets the eye.

      On the "confirm" screen in which it lists all your settings and choices the headline "Software choices" (under which gnome is listed) is clickable. Click to get access to a full package manager.

  • Car analogy..... ... .... (Score:4, Informative)

    by w0mprat ( 1317953 ) on Monday January 26, 2009 @09:28PM (#26616689)
    FTFA:

    "We didn't achieve mass customization of cars until Ford thought up the assembly line. We need the equivalent of the assembly line in the (operating system) world:"

    Err, no we don't, at least not Dell/Apple's definition of 'customization' where you have two or three choices of hardrive upgrade options, each increment of cost would buy your the retail part outright.

    Worse, ford and his mass production gave us any colour so long as it's black.

    This is rather the opposite and a Good Thing. The better analogy would have been the custom car scene from the 1950s onwards, where you can pay for a customized build, rather than do all the work yourself. This might get frowns from those who like object to paying someone do it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kenh ( 9056 )

      The customization of cars was revolutionized (defined) by Lee Iacoca and Ford when they introduced the Mustang in April, 1964 - it had an unheard-of number of options, unlike any car that came before it.

      I forget the actual number, but at a time when a base Mustang was between $2,500 and $3,000 it wasn't unusual for shoppers to add several hundred dollars of options to their car.

  • Fedora Spins? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kenh ( 9056 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @12:19AM (#26618113) Homepage Journal

    Haven't I seen this before - yes, over on Fedora, they have a "spins" functionality, making this an evolutionary, not revolutionary improvement.

    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CustomSpins [fedoraproject.org]

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by erikina ( 1112587 )
      It's not even in the same league. A fedora spin is very difficult, cumbersome and far more trouble than its worth. (Unless you're doing an official spin). Revisor [fedoraunity.org] makes it a little more palpable, but it's buggy as hell (I've not been able to get it to work, not even once.)

      From the screencast this looks easy as pie, but I'll reserve my final judgment for when I try it.

  • Similar to Fedora's revisor? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by perrin ( 891 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @05:11AM (#26619715)
    Judging from the screencast, this looks just like what Fedora is trying to do with the revisor application. I wonder how fast it is, though. In the screencast, it looked like the image was created almost instantly, while revisor can take hours to complete, and it is so full of bugs and so hard to make working images with that it is IMHO nearly unusable. I have spent days trying to make revisor and then pungi create working images with a custom kickstart file, but eventually had to go over to doing everything by hand instead. I really hope SuSe deliver on their promises on this, it will make life so much simpler for people working with embedded systems and kiosk systems.

  • I thought... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Hurricane78 ( 562437 ) <deleted@slash[ ].org ['dot' in gap]> on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @05:33AM (#26619829)

    ...that's, what Gentoo Linux is for.

    You can't get any more customization, without doing Linux from scratch.

    And why in the world would I want to install an RPM-based package manager, when I can have a Ports-based one?

  • I'm replying to and agreeing with the original comment. That's how the thread system works.

  • According to the website, Konqueror (3.5.10) isn't supported. One gets bumped to a page informing one of this advent and you are further instructed to use Safari or Firefox (2 or 3). Way to go Novell/SUSE! Gotta love a website promoting a product that doesn't support the primary webbrowser provide by said product maker! Sheesh!

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