Online Operating System Creation

A few months ago, I came across an interesting website in my browsing of OpenID sites, which I do regularly here and here.  The site I stumbled upon was in beta, so I made a note of it, and carried on.  Later, I was invited to participate in the beta, and I gotta say…  it rocks.

The site, now released to the public, is Suse Studio.  The concept behind the service is that you can remotely create, per your preferences, a Linux distribution, based on a recent Suse flavor — basically, either OpenSUSE or SUSE Enterprise Linux.

How does it work?  You login (with OpenID, or after creating an account), select a base to begin with;  GNOME, KDE, generic X, text only, etc.  You can select 32-bit or 64-bit.  Then, you can select software to be installed down to the specific package.  You can even upload your own packages — rpm, .tar, .tar.gz, .tgz, .tar.bz2, .tbz, or .zip, specify particular software repositories, or choose from over 300 pre-existing software repositories (some with rarely found packages, such as ATI or nVIDIA drivers).  After selecting software to be installed, you are brought to a configuration webpage that allows you to completely configure the system prior to building it, with the added option of uploading your own customized files.  After building the system, it can be tested via “test drive” — completely able to log into the newly built system via the website.

Once the system has been built (and optionally tested), it can be downloaded and installed as either:  Disk image, LiveCD (ISO image), Xen virtual machine, or VMware appliance.

The service is intelligently laid out, and quite intuitive, enabling the user to create systems within minutes.  Suse Studio routinely clears out built systems, but keeps the meta-info such that systems specified previously can be re-built easily and quickly.

It really seems to be a well thought out service.  I have experienced other web services that allow the user to build a Linux distribution, but never anything this detailed.