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Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Build A Linux Distro Online

I haven't tried this yet. But it looks pretty cool...

Build A Linux Distro Online

Can't code? Don't worry! You can create a top-quality custom Linux distro from the comfort of your web browser using SUSE Studio.

Posted February 1st, 2010 - 1 comment - Share This

Update: Don't feel left out if you're a Windows user. Check out our tutorial about how to build your own Windows. And if you're a die hard Linux fan, check out our guides to cluster computing in Linux and booting into Linux over a network, Or if you want a different flavour of distro, check out our comprehensive guide to using Fedora's Revisor tool.
SUSE Studio is clever. Very clever. It's the result of two years' work by a team at Novell to provide its enterprise customers with a convenient launch pad for building virtual appliances and customised distributions. It's also been a massive success, boasting over half a million downloads and over 40,000 users. But don't let the word 'enterprise' put you off: customised distributions like these are incredibly useful, whether you use them yourself, make them for someone else, or deploy them across your IT infrastructure. They represent what's great about Linux: its ability to be repackaged, copied and redistributed with complete freedom. Building your own distribution is also rather cool.

Fancy a pretty desktop like this one? You don't even have to close your web browser to create one thanks to SUSE Studio.

In serving its high-end customers, Novell has created the most powerful and most intuitive distribution design tool the low-end Linux community has ever seen. And it manages to do all this through a web browser. It makes hunting for the perfect distribution a little like online shopping. Point your cursor at a feature and it's added to your distribution. You can add as many or as few items as you wish, and when your virtual basket is full, the checkout process will let you preview your order before presenting you with a variety of delivery options.
You could download an ISO file for optical media, for example, or a pre-formatted virtual machine configuration that you could run from VMware Player, VirtualBox or Xen. There's even an option to build a Flash version of your distribution that can be written to a USB thumb drive. All of this is accomplished online through a web browser. The building process and your distribution are hosted on Novell's servers until you're ready to download the fruits of your labours. Moreover, unlike nearly every other distribution building tool, you don't need any specialist knowledge in order to create exactly what you want.

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