Coyote switching to Suse Studio for base OS
After much tinkering around with OpenEmebedded as well as RPath Linux and OpenSuse/Suse Studio, I have switched my development platform to Suse Studio. For those unaware of this marvel of technology, it is a web site that allows the creation of a customized "JeOS" (Just Enough Operating System) installation of Linux based on the Suse distribution. RPath would have been my first choice as they have multiple base distros and allow for a switch from 32 to 64 bit when building an individual appliance - but I found their web interface and service to be way too buggy.
In addition to the more stable appliance creation interface, Novell owns and operates Suse Studio and both the Suse distribution and Mono - the .net platform is very well integrated.
The use of Suse Studio / openSuse for development will save me an estimated 6 months of work over the course of the Coyote 4 development cycle (This is about the amount of time that was spent between each major release of Wolverine on the underlying custom Linux distro).
The drawback to using Suse as the core OS is the size of the installation. The base OS for Coyote 4 will be approximately 50 time larger than that of Coyote 3 and 500 time larger than Coyote 1 and 2 (which fit on a floppy). However, Coyote 4 will eventually include a full graphical console for administration, a remote web service for 3rd party applications and services to interact with, and will be capable of running many additional services. The use of a full distribution as the base for Coyote will also allow me to focus directly on the security features of the product and leave general system setup and configuration to the underlying Linux install - this will allow for a much greater array of hardware support than previously available. Approximate installation size at this time is around 500MB - however, with the cost of a 4GB flash drive being less than $20, the cost of storage capacity (even for small appliances) was not a deciding factor in my choice of base installations.
~Josh
