Probably no one mentioned (at least nothing comes up when searching) this interesting way to build a custom appliance online and even test it on site:

http://susestudio.com

I've applied for testing and after a week I have an account and already playing with it.

Yes, you are the first on this forum.

I received my invite last night and just glossed through it. Looks quite intriguing.

SuSe left a bad taste in my mouth (certain percularities that were obviously features rather than bugs), however I applaud their work and hope to see the same from other major/source distros.

Have you gone and deployed/installed an ISO generated from this online tool?

I know I'm going to be annoyed by the flood of random "distros" that are nothing more than overzealous desktop themes - everything from tv shows to religions to corporate branding.

However the ease of including custom packages should make reinstallations/deployment and livecd toolkits that make easier/quicker.

So when are the Diablo and Mer versions going to be released? (; (I am joking)

Well, you can include custom repos, so a Mer distro is certainly possible - they use the openSUSE build service anyway

This will be a great way to provide a custom development environment for your application if it is hard to be build. Lets see what will come out of it.

P.S. Just built a quick openSUSE 11.1 vmware image in 3 minutes (quite fast, I expected slower) and I'm now test driving it (the test drive is running inside the browser and you have a limit of one hour to meddle with the test), probably to avoid someone using it as a simple desktop replacement. Of course you can download the entire image for test locally.

You can also export the kiwi konfig to build the appliance locally if you want.

I just signed up for an invitation. I hope I can start using it soon. I saw the screencast and had ideas for something personal. It's gonna be great. Thanks for this Bundyo!

Jesse~