On Wednesday 29 July 2009 04:34:39 Larry Stotler wrote:

The Register is reporting that SUSE studio is out of Beta here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/28/novell_suse_appliances/

But when I went to the site, I can't create an account. What gives?

It's out of Beta - but AFAIK still on invitation only basis. What do you want to do with Studio? Do you have anything concrete planned? Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, aj@{novell.com,opensuse.org} SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126

I never even noticed it was out of beta. Does anyone know more details about the Lifecycle Management Server and WebYast? What about the SLE licensing? Really will every agreement need to be negotiated or will there be a standard pricing model? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Larry Stotler wrote:

The Register is reporting that SUSE studio is out of Beta here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/28/novell_suse_appliances/

But when I went to the site, I can't create an account. What gives?

Worked for me. I used a supported browser first off. The login screen clearly says internet explorer isn't supported. (which I love. In a million years I couldn't put such a page on our web site without getting almost fired for being too out of touch to be trusted, but I love that someone else had the balls to give them back a taste of their own.) I filled in the request for an account, waited, a few minutes later I received an email with instructions for logging in, and about 1/2 hour after that I had my first custom distribution. This thing is GREAT! But, the site clearly says all you are doing is requesting an invitation, not demanding your god given right to an account. It also clearly says you will have a better chance of being given an invitation if you describe a little about what specifically you plan to use this appliance-builder for, which to me implies also having some sort of at least marginally interesting plan to describe. (maybe they don't want the service filled up and bogged down with junk?) In my case I think my plan was typical of most, or at least typical of what they seem to have designed this service for. I had 2 things I wanted to do, 1 - Custom distro install media and/or live-cd to support our own software / services. IE, basically, I work for a company that writes and sells software that we currently use opensuse as the host for on all boxes. Take one of our typical production boxes after I have hand crafted it's software load and configuration, and create a custom install media or live-cd or live raw disk image for hard drive or usb stick, that produces a server that is all preinstalled and preconfigured right from install time. In one sense this is not much different from what you can do already with autoyast & autoinst.xml This is faster though. The result here isn't an install script/recipe, it's an already installed system. Ready to drop into xen or vmware or onto a cd or usb drive and run. That's insanely faster to deploy. They call this an appliance and it could be thought of that way. Take your software and wrap it in just enough OS to support that app and now you have a neat little myapp toaster. People have been doing this for years with email servers, router/firewalls, samba file servers, but now they just made it easy to do it with your own application or any application or combination of apps you happen to want. This one I've done the initial version of already. In only a few minutes I set up our basic software selection (the minimal text-only system plus the various things we happen to need like ghostpdl, rsync, imagemagick, termcap and ncurses libs to support the commercoal database 4gl, etc... and added a tiny amout of customization (our logo to replace the suse branding) and produced a disk image which I downloaded and wrote to a usb drive with dd, and the the thing booted right up and ran. no install process other than that dd. It booted and went right to a regular login prompt of a fully installed system. AWSOME! 2 - I wanted to take our excellent hylafax-plus server which I have set up by hand, and package it up into a reproduceable appliance. It doesn't clone my actual existing box of course, I do have to replicate or express the software selection and configuration process again within the studio system, but at least I only have to do it once, and then just perpetually tweak and improve it, and I can generate unlimited number of copies to install new physical boxes just about effortlessly. I haven't started this one yet but it should be even easier than the first one because it's an even more limited special purpose box requiring even less software. Both of these seem to be exactly what the service was designed to facilitate. I think it's unlikely but it might possibly have also helped slightly that I have a handful of packages that I have been maintaining in the opensuse build service for a while which maybe shows that I know how to make productive use of their services. But in truth the response came back so fast that I don't actually think a person really looked over and morally judged the request like that. If you fill in the form and don't get a reply, that doesn't mean it's broken, according to the verbiage right there on the site. But this is what I did so maybe you can emulate it if you have no luck elsewise. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org