Everyone can easily create his own version of Fedora with the re-spin tool Revisor. OpenSuse also develops a tool with a similar purpose, KIWI.
The idea of creating customized versions of an existing distribution is not new, but Fedora 7 took this idea to a next level by introducing an easy-to-use GUI and a wizard-like walk through for the single steps in the form of Revisor.
A similar GUI was now developed for OpenSuse’s tool KIWI. As Revisor KIWI is mainly developed to produce re-spins in various forms. While it is said to be distribution independent it is mainly used for OpenSuse. The best known application yet is arguable the KDE Four Live spin featuring an OpenSuse with a recent KDE 4 svn version installed.
Now the first screenshots of a GUI (in early development ) were revealed. Everyone who is used to Yast will feel at home immediately as it looks like.
Nice to see that other distributions plan to give their users similar possibilities as Revisor gives. Also, this competition shows the parts where Revisor could be extended. For example I pretty much like the idea that the OpenSuse installer can create images for a variety of virtual machines: Xen, VMware and Qemu (I miss virtual box here!).
Combined with some kind of automatic build system every developer could distribute test images for virtual machines to test new introduced features or changes. That would make testing much easier since no one would have to change a running system.
The next step would be to be able to create system snapshots out of an existing machine – PCLinuxOS supports this with the help of a Debian script afaik. That makes it even easier to distribute specific, dedicated appliances.
