A Walk Through SUSE Studio

SUSE Studio is a new Web based service for creating Linux appliances based on openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. It allows users to build custom Linux distributions including selected software packages and configurations.

You can add packages from several software repositories, upload RPMs, as well as self created archives that will be extracted to the specified directories. Moreover, you can create databases and upload SQL dumps as needed to run your applications.

Currently, you need an invitation to use SUSE Studio, which I did yesterday for the first time. I am pretty impressed. The interface looks really nice and is easy and intuitive to use.

Once you created an appliance you can build a live CD/DVD image (.iso), a disk image, as well as virtual machines for VMware, VirtualBox and Xen. Images can be downloaded or tested within the browser via a flash based interface, which is of course slower than running it in VirtualBox but saves the download time.

Metus Marukatat from It'sAllLinux created this demo video walking through the basic stages of creating a Linux appliance with SUSE Studio. He could not demo the online testdrive though, since the service was too busy.