Roll your own Linux, share with the world
The new SUSE Studio tool make it easier than ever before for millions of system admins to build their own custom Linux systems, and share them online.
I can't help but be amazed at how malleable the concept of the operating system is becoming these days.
The design of a Linux system is inherently modular, built from hundreds (or even thousands) of individual open-source projects, and anyone with the necessary time and skill can use those modules to build their own unique OS.
Of course, most of us leave that job to the likes or Ubuntu or Red Hat, but a new tool promises to make it easier than ever before to build your own custom Linux system.
SUSE Studio
SUSE Studio is an experimental distribution customisation system from Novell, based on its SUSE Linux distribution. [UPDATE: Note, SUSE Studio is still in beta]
From its web interface, you can build up your own customised Linux system, starting from a base template and adding the extra packages you need.
At the end of the process, SUSE Studio builds your configuration in to a disk image, in one of a number of formats: a raw image that you can write to a hard drive or USB key, a live CD image that you can burn and boot from, or a VMware disk image for virtualisation.
The SUSE Studio concept isn't entirely dissimilar to Red Hat's Kickstart tool, which lets sysadmins write scripts that automate the Red Hat installation process, complete with custom package selections or configuration changes.
Both could help a sysadmin roll out the same customised OS to multiple systems, but what sets SUSE Studio apart is its easy web-based interface and community-focused design.
Systems for the people
When you build a system in SUSE Studio, you can keep it to yourself if you like, and if you're just packaging a custom desktop system for your network then you'll probably want to do that.
If you're building something more general, though, like a pre-configured mail or web server, you can add it to an online collection of pre-build systems, ready for anyone to download and use.
For instance, if you wanted to build a web-based forum, you could build a custom system, starting with a basic text-only system and adding Apache, MySQL, PHP, and the forum software you wish to use. If you package that system as a VMware image, anyone with a VMware server could download your image and get a new web forum running within minutes.
The new app bundle?
This concept reminds me a little of how Mac OS X packages applications. Rather than spreading libraries and resources through the system like Linux does, Mac OS X stores everything an application needs in to a ".app" bundle.
The Mac OS X desktop treats that bundle as a single file, but if you dig deeper you discover that it's actually a directory, filled with libraries, executable code, and other resources.
With SUSE Studio images running under a virtualisation platform, the OS becomes the app bundle. One image file contains not just the application itself, but all of the supporting applications, like web and database servers, and just enough of a supporting OS to get all that running.
That entire system can then be booted up, shut down, or moved off to another system, just like an individual application can be on a traditional OS.
If SUSE Studio manages to build a solid community once it's publicly available, with users creating solid, useful application bundle images, it could make life much easier for us poor sysadmins.
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