Suse Studio: Linux customization for the masses
One of the great promises of software is its infinite malleability: software can be whatever you want, so long as you have the skills necessary (and legal rights) to modify it.
Despite this promise, software has long sought to replicate physical goods: mass-produced with customization, if any, coming post-sale by a system integrator or other consultant. This has helped churn out billion-dollar software companies such as Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft, but it has failed to satisfy customer demand for a tailored fit.
I'm therefore hugely impressed by Novell's Suse Studio, an innovative way to enable both standardization and customization of a Linux distribution.
Nat Friedman, Novell's chief technology and strategy officer for open source, has been working on Suse Studio for some time, but it was at VMworld in September that Novell first publicly demonstrated the product.
Since then, Novell has not said much publicly about the alpha-stage product. That's too bad, as this may well be one of the industry's most exciting and transformational software releases in years.
Why? Novell explains:
Suse Studio is a new, innovative Web-based service to enable (independent software vendors), developers, and the community to quickly and easily "mass customize" Linux. Suse Studio is the first tool to enable users to create fully supported, customized variants of Suse Linux Enterprise and OpenSuse, add additional software, and test the resulting image--all in one simple and easy-to-use interface.
"Mass customization." The idea is sheer brilliance, and the execution of it may be just as good. Novell's senior manager for Suse Studio, Matthew Richards, hit many of the high points of Suse Studio in a Network World article released on Thursday:
We didn't achieve mass customization of cars until Ford thought up the assembly line. We need the equivalent of the assembly line in the (operating system) world: tools that provide rapid, fully supported mass-market efficiency, reliability, and consistency, while allowing for individuality.
Even so, Richards largely glossed over the most important (and seemingly impossible) aspect of Suse Studio's myriad customizations: they will be fully supported.
In 2000, my company, embedded Linux vendor Lineo, figured out how to enable our customers to "mass customize" Linux with our software development kit. What we didn't figure out, and what no one after us has, until now, was how to fully support the output of that SDK.
Novell has now cracked the supportability code. I asked Justin Steinman, Novell's vice president of solution and product marketing, how Novell will support the wide variety of tailored Suse Linux distributions its customers will create, and I got the following response:
We will build a "supportability algorithm" into Suse Studio. If your "customized (Suse Linux Enterprise)" passes the algorithm, then we will support it. If your "customized SLE" doesn't pass the algorithm, then we tell you what needs to be added to your "custom distro" for it to be supported.
It really is a fantastic idea, which, if emulated by others in the open-source world, should make open source the de facto choice for enterprise IT, original equipment manufacturers, and others. This could be a very big deal.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
http://revisor.fedoraunity.org/
With testdrive, your VMware image will be run from a KVM instance... you can see the console/x session using the provided VNC connection (within the browser). Any change that gets made is recorded (file creation). You can select those files from the Overlay files tab and import those into your appliance... which can be rebuild and will then include those files. This way you can very easily customize your images without the need to use a plethora of additional tools. All from within the same interface.
Additional remark: Kanarip (creator of the revisor tool) posted a message today: http://kanarip.livejournal.com/8249.html... about this application not being open... and correct towards it's 'community'. First of all, this tool is still Alpha... Novell will probably open it up to others when it reaches a stable status. And perhaps who knows what will happen later.
Linux, the OS only meant for tinkering with.
You are a true idiot.
1%? You are dreaming. What do you think runs many servers, firewalls, and other backend systems.
1% isn't even true on the desktop. You would be surprised how many alleged Windows boxes don't have Windows installed.
And let's not forget that Linux is big in supercomputing clusters, and animation rendering.
Linux does the majority of the heavy computing lifting.
What "rich multimedia stuff" does Linux not do?
Windows is the OS for those who really enjoy menial tasks. Apple is the OS for those who like to pay for things that tend not to break with good design, but who also enjoy not having much freedom in what they can do with those things (Windows has this same feature, but it's turned down when it comes to hardware). Linux, on the other hand, is the OS meant for those who like to have freedom, like to be able to use their software as they'd like, like to be able to do what they want without all the menial tasks just to keep their computer running.
From your comment, I would guess that YOU are the hobbyist.
You forgot to add if it was written well.
Poorly written software can't be changed, unless you are committed to rewrite to correctly.
The supported part you are trumpeting probably isn't nearly as good as you think. How far from a standard SuSE build can you go before there is no support? No one is telling yet, but I wager it isn't very far. How much will this support cost and will it be any good?
More importantly, can you redistribute the results? You might think the answer is yes, but it is not a given. Can those you distribute it to get support from Novell as well? What about mono? It is nearly impossible to get a functioning opensuse distro untainted from the mono stink. Can you do it with this? Knowing Novell, it is likely that whatever you produce will be full of this poison. There are too many important unanswered questions to be able to trumpet it now.
With the countless repos, and their build service, not too mention that all gui environments are very customizable, you can do anything you want now. Offering vague levels of support is a bit of a red herring.
This is why I wish Novell would start an open-source SLES project as well. I think you'd have a lot of developers (many who run a Novell shop already) that could contribute to some of the free applications that you can run side by side with Novell's OES applications. I think a SUSE Enterprise is a solid OS, but I believe there is a lot of room for improvement to make it rock solid. It may also help to have developers input on angles of the operating system that make it easy for Novell to write better code for their OES products to run flawless on top of linux.
First of all, Ford wasn't responsible for mass customization of cars. "They can have any color as long as it's black" - is I believe the canonical Henry Ford quote. GM was the first company to ACTUALLY offer multiple colors, and it had nothing to do with the use of assembly lines AT ALL. This is basic business history.
Second, having worked on OS's and fairly complex pieces of middleware, I can tell you that guaranteeing supportability through a magic algorithm is about as achieveable as guaranteeing supportability through formal correctness proofs. This is mostly marketing fluff, and a less gullible reporter would smell the bs here.
- by leesdowdle January 25, 2009 1:43 PM PST
- Fedora has a nice program for building your own respin and I use it myself to create a custom spin that contains all of the updates (Fedora updates often and in mass and their initial install media is very, very, very outdated after a month or two) plus some additional software from a third-party repo. You can watch a screencast I did on the process here:
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(16 Comments)Screencast: How to Build a Fedora 10 Remix
http://www.montanalinux.org/fedora-remix-howto-screencast.html
In the screencast I build a LiveDVD. Fedora has software with which you can easily create a LiveUSB (with persistent storage and even an encrypted home partition)... and then you can either boot the LiveDVD, LiveUSB on physical hardware or run it in KVM that is included with Fedora assuming you have VT support in your CPU.
While Fedora's process isn't as integrated as SUSE Studio appears to be (web-app and KVM) any end user can do it now. This capability has actually been around for a few releases. One difference might be though that Fedora doesn't offer paid support for their main product nor the respins you make yourself.
The author says what a major step and an innovation SUSE Studio will be but doesn't really elaborate on how it is such.