Import KIWI and AutoYaST configurations easily

SUSE Studio offers nice user interface for configuring software appliances with many options. But what if you already had a configuration ready — for example a carefully tuned AutoYaST profile which your company uses for installing workstations? Or a KIWI configuration of your appliance exported from Studio (so that you could build that appliance on your machine) which you modified locally? Until now, there was no easy way how to apply it in Studio.

This is why we prepared a brand new KIWI and AutoYaST configuration import feature. If you enable it (more about that below), you can easily create an appliance based on your settings. Just go to your Studio home page, click the Create new appliance... button and select the Import icon instead of one of the templates.

You can then upload your KIWI configuration or AutoYaST profile. Studio will automatically detect which one you used and create a new appliance with the configuration settings applied.

Supported settings

KIWI and AutoYaST imports support the following settings:

Setting	KIWI	AutoYaST
Name	X	–
Architecture	X	(1)
Base system	X	(1)
Users	X	X
Repositories	X	X
Pacakges	X	X
Patterns	–	X
Network settings	X	–
Boot settings	X	–
Build scripts	X	–
Logos	X	–
Background theming	X	–
Overlay files	X	X

(1) The architecture and base system are selected by the user during the import. This information is not contained in the AutoYaST profile as the profiles are designed to be generic.

What about the settings Studio can’t import? In case of AutoYaST, we apply the unimported settings using AutoYaST itself when the appliance boots for the first time. You can edit the applied profile (with already imported settings stripped) in the Configuration → Scripts tab in the appliance configuration.

Enabling the imports

The KIWI and AutoYaST imports are still in beta — which means they aren’t enabled by default. To enable them, go to your profile page and click on the Enable experimental features button (this will give you access to all beta features we introduce).

As with all software still in beta, bugs are expected. If you’ll note anything not working as expected, let us know so we can look at the issue and fix it.

More secure SUSE Gallery

This week we introduced an important feature to SUSE Gallery — the appliance security summary. It is displayed for every published appliance and is designed to help you better understand what the appliance contains. This is useful for security reasons as you can easily see if the appliance contains any sources where undesirable code might slip in. It also provides a quick overview of the appliance’s contents.

The security summary will tell you if the appliance contains:

• unofficial software sources (repositories)
• custom software packages
• overlay files (especially executable ones)
• custom scripts that run after boot

Of course, the presence of any of these does not mean that the appliance is unsafe — many regular and completely safe appliances will have some yellow warning icons displayed in the summary. But it gives you some hints and more control. If you ever encounter any unsafe appliance, simply report it. We will take it down immediately and flag the appliance creator’s account accordingly.

Featured appliance - MiniSUSE

As promised, we have a new featured appliance this week and it belongs to Horváth Gergely J.. He will be receiving his Amazon gift card real soon!

His winning MiniSUSE appliance is based on openSUSE 11.3 (the current latest version) and is intended as a Live CD/DVD or USB thumbdrive. It is a small but useful Linux system that you can use as a rescue disk, to format drives, etc. A "Swiss army knife for your Linux needs" as Horváth puts it.

If you need a small and quick openSUSE system to try out, be sure to check this one out!

New featured appliance of the week!

Congratulations to Patrick Shoaf for landing a spot in our "Featured appliance" section in SUSE Gallery! His winning VMware Open View appliance is a bootable Linux Thin Client that autoloads and runs VMware View 4.5 Open Client. It is available as a live disk image (for USB/Flash and hard drives) as well as live CD/DVD.

Patrick gets an Amazon gift card from us as a small token of appreciation for his efforts. We will be selecting a new featured appliance in SUSE Gallery each week, so stay tuned as yours might be next!

Win $10,000 building appliances with SUSE Studio

In case you haven't heard about The Disters Contest yet, check it out now. We are looking for the best appliances in two categories, community and commercial. The winners will get $10,000 each. So don't wait, go to SUSE Studio, build your appliance, publish it on SUSE Gallery, and submit it to the contest. While there is still some time before the contest closes, don't wait with publishing it. You still have time to refine it, and you will get valuable feedback. The proven "release early, release often" philosophy applies here as well.

If you are looking for inspiration, you can browse SUSE Gallery for some examples. There are live CDs as demos of applications like Marble in a box, special purpose distributions like openSUSE Medical, templates providing a software stack as base for other appliances like the LAMP server, or special-purpose applications, which run well as appliance, like the Subscription Management Tool.

While there are various ways to include software in Studio, the best is to use the openSUSE Build Service to package it, and then import it in SUSE Studio. In many cases there already will be a package, and if not, it's certainly a worthwhile effort to create one. See for example the Build Service Tutorial for some more information how to do this. For details about how to do specific things in SUSE Studio, which might not be obvious in the UI, there is for example a series of SUSE Studio Howtos in the openSUSE Wiki, and of course you can discuss how to do things with other users and developers in the forum or on IRC.

I'm really looking forward to see your appliances on SUSE Gallery. Just to give some more ideas, it would for example to be great to have a Drupal, Gitorious,  or status.net appliance, which can be used out of the box. Or you could create a template for use by other people, e.g. a Rails server, complete with deployment and monitoring tools. Or you create an optimized environment for development of KDE, GNOME, Mono, or some other applications, including development packages, documentation, and programming tools, maybe even a pre-configured IDE. There are certainly tons of other ideas. Feel free to add them in the comments and tell us and others what you would like to see on SUSE Gallery.

Build openSUSE 11.3 appliances now

It took us a bit longer than expected, but now we are happy to announce, that SUSE Studio now also supports building appliances based on openSUSE 11.3. So you can take advantage of the latest and greatest features, which come with this release of openSUSE. We will continue to support building existing appliances on older openSUSE versions, but new openSUSE based appliances will all be 11.3.

We will also add migration of 11.2 based appliances to 11.3, so that you can easily move existing appliances to the latest openSUSE version. If all goes well, we'll release this next week. Until then you can just continue with your 11.2 based appliances and migrate them later, or if you prefer to have 11.3 immediately start with a new one.

Have a lot of fun with openSUSE 11.3 in SUSE Studio.

SUSE Gallery launch

We're proud to announce that SUSE Gallery is now available to all Studio users! That's right, it's finally out of beta and you no longer need to opt-in to access it.

SUSE Gallery now has its own domain at susegallery.com. This will be the destination site for users who want to find an existing appliance that they can download and use immediately. It is tightly integrated with SUSE Studio, so you can still easily customize the appliances if you want to do so.

Both SUSE Studio and Gallery share the same login, so you only need to sign in once to access both sites. Once you're signed in, you can easily switch between both sites via the "Gallery" and "Studio" links in the user navigation bar at the top of the page.

For details on how you can share your appliance with SUSE Gallery, please refer to our previous blog post. You can skip the section on "Enabling SUSE Gallery" since that is not longer required. We hope you enjoying using SUSE Gallery as much as we do!