A few days ago I was invited by someone working for a PR-firm representing Novell/Suse to try out the brand-new Suse Studio.
I was a bit reluctant to do this since I’m heavily invested in more Debian-y versions of Linux and have had nothing to do with Suse since the late nineties when I had a brief fling with that distribution. Add to this that I have some relatively minor ideological issues with Novell, especially regarding their deal with Microsoft regarding the Microsoft patent-trolling a while back. Finally I felt that accepting this would entail some kind of reciprocation from me which I didn’t like the idea of. However, I was assured that there would be no strings attached, it was simply an opportunity to try it out and there were no kickbacks expected.
So I said, fine, I’ll give it a go and see if it sparks my fancy.
Yesterday I got a big box from them. Contained in this box was a slightly smaller box. It was emblazoned with various logos, and contained technical whitepapers, a pre-printed letter from Matthew Richards (Sr. Program Manager at SUSE Appliance Program) and a kit to build a foam gecko.
There wasn’t a single disc since Suse Studio is a cloud-application. So essentially what was sent to me was a expensive box with a neat little toy inside it, with some papers I wasn’t interested in reading.
I’ll admit that I had some fun building the gecko. It brought me back to my Lego days, and now I have a Suse gecko to decorate my computer with.
As for Suse Studio, it’s a web-application-cloud-thingy where you can build a custom linux “appliance”, i.e. a customized Suse distribution of Linux. It’s easy to use and I tried out building a custom OpenSuse with KDE4 and some minor tweaks. You can go really advanced to and make custom scripts and such, but if you’re happy with just some point-and-click it’s dirt easy to build a custom Linux appliance.
When you’re happy with the contents you can have it built as various different media. For example, you can have it built as a Live-CD .iso or plop it on a thumbdrive.
You can base your appliance on one of three different flavors of Suse: Either base it on OpenSuse or Suse Enterprise in versions 10 or 11. After that choose from various templates or get down and dirty with much more individual packages. The templates are nice, you can choose a quick desktop environment (KDE or Gnome) and add packages for server-use or desktop-use.
All in all, it’s a neat service and works quite well. When you’re happy with the contents of your appliance you build it. It’s then placed in a queue for build and takes a few minutes or hours to build to your specs, depending on what you put in it and how complex it is.
Now for some pictures. These are all clickable for a bigger size.
This is part of the main interface of Suse Studio. As you can see it’s quite simple to use.
Having fun building the Gecko-kit.
The finished result. I had quite a lot of fun building it.
Suse Gecko on top of my Ubuntu-powered computer. Oh the sweet irony.
Leftovers from the Gecko-build. I tried to reuse as much as possible but there were lots of things which I considered to be scraps that I just threw away. The environmentalist in me felt that this was wasteful, as was shipping this in a big heavy box too.
… Speaking of the box, this is it. It’s quite heavy, very designed and contained nothing except the technical whitepapers and the gecko-kit. Again, the environmentalist in me cringes a bit at sending a bunch of these out around the world since the software isn’t even in the box. But it’s great PR, I suppose. And every geek loves free toys.