The new OpenSuSE Studio in Action

12.04.2009 02:04 Age: 1239516240

A first small look on the new OpenSuSE Studio, its features, handling, and what you may get out of it for your own use.

A glimpse at OpenSuSE Studio's built in Testdrive Applet

I have had a chance to take a look at the new OpenSuSE Studio, which is Novell's new approach to Web 2.0 Technology.
Creating your own Distribution online and then just mount it up on your VMWare or Virtualbox, or boot it as a livecd has had quite an appeal to me, over all, the tool looks very promising, works without a problem, i had a few slow moments caused by the ajax included in the webpage, but nothing major, no crashes so far, and the test drive technology, which enables you to run your image before actually downloading it is one neat way to use java servlets. the size of he default images is quite promising, not as bloated as what i was used to by OpenSuSE, available as packages we have 6 different base profiles, shell only, jeos (OpenSuSE's minimal System), a minimal x windows system featuring icewm as window manager (i still wonder where fvwm 2 went...), a base gnome system, a base kde 3 system, and a base kde 4 system. packages can easily be added via the web interface, which proofs to be a good web version of yast, same logic as with yast also applies to it, you can add, remove, check dependencies etc... The web interface itself is very intuitive, i just found my way through it immediatly. with a few clicks, you can configure your lan settings, your firewall base rules (only two rules available so far... i hope there will be more of them when OpenSuSE Studio will be made public...), bootup themes, languages for the console and x. another neat feature is the possibility to add your own packages and files to your profiles, imagine a presentation livecd, a vpn server or client preconfigured, a testset with a database and webserver... and many more options there. The Web interface also gives you notices and tips on things you do or could do when building your profile, e.g. vmware tools and tray icons are available by click when you do a vmware image, and when selecting a database, it tells you, that you will have to add your own mysql dump file... even adding shell users got quite simple, you just click on the add link or icon, and you will have another users settings that you may change to your likings... overall the new OpenSuSE Studio has quite a potential, which, if right promoted could bring Novell up to some new Flair. I have made a small screencast and a gallery of the look and feel of the whole process, check links below for more information on it.