SUSE Studio: Too Good To Be True?

I just built my own Linux distribution through my browser. It can be ran as a Live CD or installed on your system. No, you did read that correctly. I actually used Firefox to build my own SUSE-based distro. Sometimes technology throws curveballs at us that are so unbelievable you’d have to read the statement several times to realize that you aren’t hallucinating. Do you think I’m writing a piece of science fiction? Enter SUSE Studio.

In all seriousness, it may not be as amazing or as far fetched as my previous paragraph made it seem. Yet, that’s how I feel – generally amazed. In fact, just last week I was researching Debian Squeeze a bit for an article I may or may not finish, and my experiment was to create my own custom distribution for my own personal use including my favorite apps with the Debian framework. Needless to say it takes a bit of time to customize a distribution by trimming the things you don’t want and installing the things you do. You can imagine my shock when I found out about SUSE Studio and the claim that this can be done through a web browser. I jumped on this a few days ago and I received my invite this morning and I’ve been playing with this new service nonstop since.

The interface for SUSE Studio is as simiplistic as it gets. Choose a product to base your custom spin on (“Just enough OS”, “GNOME desktop”, “KDE desktop”, “minimal X”, and more), give it a name, and then start customizing. The software tab allows you to pick and choose what applications you want, and you can even add your own repositories. Once you finish that, you then proceed to choose your own logo, whether to boot into a graphical environment, and more. Finally, when you are done, build it.

I decided to start with JeOS (just enough OS) and add only the packages I wanted. I started by enabling the KDE Factory repositories so I can have a KDE 4.3 desktop, and then I proceeded to add my favorite things such as Firefox, Thunderbird, xGalaga, Frozen-Bubble, Wesnoth, Chromium, KTorrent, and some other things I threw in. I then started to build the “appliance” (as SUSE Studio calls its creations) and after about an hour I noticed that it was ready.

Check out the screenshot below for a quick view of adding applications (click for a larger view):

That’s great and all, but how many CDR’s would I need for this? Knowing me, if I forgot something I would have to rebuild it and then reburn it. I figured I would probably waste an entire spindle on this project by the time I got it done. Before I even started to download the ISO I created, I found an option to boot my new distro in the web browser itself.

Wait, what?! Should there be a limit as to how cool this thing can be? I guess not. My newly created distro booted in Firefox and it didn’t care what OS the browser was running on. It just worked. I was actually using a KDE 4.3.0 desktop in a web browser that I created. Proof is below (again, click for a larger view):

I am somewhat weary of this though. How can something this good be free? Think about it for a moment. How much bandwidth will it take Novell once its opened up to the public (its just by invite right now) and a ton of people start using it? Then again, it’s hard to believe that Linux itself is free sometimes given how awesome it is. How can Novell afford to do this? Regardless, I hope this continues and doesn’t go anywhere. I also hope other distros (such as Ubuntu) follow and do something similar so everyone can build an appliance that uses their personal favorite packaging system.

Overall
SUSE Studio is a wonderful service that is a ton of fun to use. I cannot say anything bad about it. After all, Novell gives us something that they didn’t have to and this product goes above and beyond the call of duty and has completely blown me away. Sure, you can’t do extremely advanced things like change the packaging system (or can you?) but the options it does provide is many. And to think, the possibilities are endless. Want to create a

The Good:

• Amazing potential
• A ton of fun

The Bad:

• Builds take a while (that’s to be expected though)

Overall: 5/5 (Outstanding!)