If you’ve never heard of SUSE Studio, it’s a service offered by SUSE that allows users to create their own respins of their GNU/Linux Operating System; OBS, is a tool designed for easing package distribution. Both tools use the same engine, and so SUSE has decided to merge the two into one product and rebrand the system, “SUSE Studio Express”
Andreas Jaeger, an author for the SUSE blog published an article the merger.
In it, Jaeger writes, “Reviewing these offerings and the way the image build situation has evolved, we have decided to merge the two online services, OBS and SUSE Studio, into a common solution.
Looking at the feature requests for SUSE Studio on image building and looking at our technologies, we decided to use OBS as the base for our image building service. Since OBS already builds images for various environments, we will first add a new image building GUI to OBS. This combined solution will now be delivered as “SUSE Studio Express”.
Some of the features listed on the post for the new SUSE Studio Express are:
- Collaboration on image building: You can do the usual clone, change, submit, and review cycle to update an image and send it back to the original owner. This also works for image templates that others use as a base.
- Support for additional architectures: SUSE Studio only handled x86-64. With the SUSE Studio Express, you will build images for all SUSE architectures – not only for Intel/AMD x86-64 but later also for ARM, Power and z Systems.
- Open Development: The complete source code is available and the development team is blogging about their sprint reports. If you would like to contribute code to the new UI or add image templates, go ahead!
- We expect OBS will be more flexible, being able to support further imaging tool chains.
- The development of new images can be done as part of the distribution development, so that images work directly at release of a product. This also allows us to support these images with maintenance updates in the future. In addition, building of images for not yet released distributions will possible.
Read also: Core Linux Question and Answers For Beginners
Closing Words
SUSE Studio has been something I have played with in the past, although I never sat down and went deep into making my own respin, but I can say that the customization and power behind the tool is pretty awesome, and surprisingly easy to use. I may one day take a look at this new offering and play around with it myself.
What about you? Have you ever used SUSE Studio? Does this new offering sound like something you would be interested in checking out? Let us know in the comments what your thoughts are!