SUSE Studio allows you to build/create your own Linux distribution based on SUSE linux.

“Build an appliance — or your own custom Linux distro — with a few mouse clicks. Customize it to your heart’s content, and share it with the world!”

You can currently choose from one of many options available to create a OpenSUSE, SLES 10, SLED 10, SLES 11, or SLED 11 machine. You can create a custom boot menu with the option to upload your own image for bootsplash. Complete control over packages, ability to overlay files (this means you can inject scripts or your own program you are distributing) right into the machine.

Once you have completed creating your custom machine you can build it into a Live CD/DVD or a disk image (this can be DD’d onto a USB Stick or another for booting) or a VMWare Disk Image or a XEN Disk Image.

From here your SUSE Studio machine is just a quick download away, the machine I test built was just a 220MB download and on a 20mbit internet connection I was able to download my image at roughly 550kb/sec and took around 15 minutes.

This is a very well polished service and is currently still in beta. I can’t wait to see what these guys come up with next.

On the cards were CentOS, Ubuntu LTS, and OpenSUSE. Our main requirements were the ability to access upgrades and the use of an auto build system for rapid deployment. CentOS was ruled out early in the piece (unfortunately I have to say only for petty reasons, none of which are worth listing here). So the competition was between Ubuntu and OpenSUSE, now my personal opinion here would be for Ubuntu to be the successor but unfortunately it had a few fatal flaws.

The main positive for Ubuntu was the 5 year life cycle for Ubuntu LTS releases, 8.04 was the last so that gave me 4 years of supported updates. Also the Debian pedegree tied with the ideology of ease of usability. The only real subtractor was the Ubuntu auto build facilities. They just plain failed to function, I followed the directions laid out somewhere in the Ubuntu help pages but the installation of the required components failed. It was just plain clunky and immature, hopefully in time it will get there.

OpenSUSE had the smallest amount of change required for implementation. Almost all of the existing system documentation was still relevant between SLES and OpenSUSE including all custom scripts and applications just slid into place and worked out of the box. Autoyast was also a big massive tick in its favour, we had already been using the autoinstall system for our SLES setup. The only downside to choosing OpenSUSE was the short life cycle. Each OpenSUSE release will only support updates for two years at which point the move to the latest version will be required (either that or go through the process of selecting a new distribution again).

A couple of application compatibility issues surrounding going through two major application changes, those being PHP 5.1 to 5.2 and PostgreSQL from 8.1 to 8.3 but all issues were relatively simple to fix as our applications are developed in house. In summary, the migration has been a complete success and has been relatively painless, there were no real gotchas.