I have talked briefly, in past articles, of my laziness. This isn't mere hubris (or the lazy-man's version of hubris...which I could take two seconds to look up in the thesaurus... but... think of all those letters I'd have to type...). I truly am a lazy person. It, in large part, defines who I am as a man.

This laziness applies to my computing as well. Specifically: setting up new system installs.

And, with what I do for a living, I tend to need to blow away, and re-install, one PC or another pretty doggone often. A new clean build/test environment needs to be set up; I hosed my desktop PC by installing a bunch of tools I'll never need; demo machines need to be configured...it goes on and on.

So, of course, I need a way to make that process as fast and painless as possible. Because of the lazy thing I was talking about before.

What would be ideal is to have some sort of webpage where I could check boxes next to what sort of OS and applications I want, add in any settings I like (wallpaper, software repositories, accounts, etc.), and then click to download a ready-to-use CD or VirtualBox image.

Oh! What would be even cooler than that is if it could remember what I had set up previously...then, whenever I go back to that page, I can grab a new CD image (aka "an appliance"), custom built with the latest and greatest versions of everything I had selected. That way, I would never have to update the images I use to restore my systems manually.

That would be taking laziness to 11.

Wham-o! SUSE Studio.

Seriously. SUSE Studio does all of that (using openSUSE or SUSE Linux Enterprise as a base platform that can be tweaked to your heart’s content). It's borderline incredible.

Do you run a company's IT and need a consistent, always-up-to-date platform that can be tailored to your business’s needs? Or perhaps you're just lazy, like me. Either way, the time saving with this tool is off the charts.

To encourage people like me to be even lazier, they provide a free gallery of appliances that have been created (and shared) by others, many of which you can clone as a starting point for your own system.

Honestly, the usefulness of SUSE Studio would make me consider migrating from another system (such as Ubuntu, Windows, etc.). It’s definitely worth taking a look, especially considering the fact that it's free.