"Novell's SUSE Studio brings a slick automation process to the
world of Linux appliances. All that's needed on your part is a few
mouse clicks and fifteen to twenty minutes of your time. Once the
process is complete you'll have a fully bootable image to download
in one of several formats, including a VMware image.
"The SUSE Studio website uses a very clean wizard and
dialog-based approach to lead you through the build process.
Options for each step are presented in logical groupings with short
descriptions to help you make your selections. The Novell / SUSE
team has put a lot of thought and design effort into the SUSE
Studio site, resulting in an extremely easy to use Linux-appliance
building experience.
"Novell has another tool called the openSUSE Build Service (OBS)
that SUSE Studio leverages for a good bit of its functionality. OBS
provides a simple web-based and command line interface to a tool
for building software packages targeted at specific Linux
distributions. With this tool in hand you can easily automate the
configuration and building of virtually any open source tool
targeted at your distribution. While OBS was originally built with
openSUSE as the primary target platform, it does offer support for
all the major Linux distributions."
