If you happen to be at OSCON this week, don’t miss Nat’s talk on Linux and virtual appliances. I attended this talk (or at least the first iteration of it) at LinuxTag, and really enjoyed it. Not just good info — though, of course, lots of that — Nat’s also large with the presentation skills, and generally fun when it comes to public speaking.

And, if you’re interested in virtual appliances, be sure to check out this post by Hubert Mantel. Hubert talks about the LimeJeOS project and how you can get it. What’s LimeJeOS? Glad you asked!

LimeJeOS is the openSUSE version of JeOS. The term JeOS (”Just enough Operating System”) refers to a customized operating system that precisely fits the needs of a particular application. LimeJeOS includes only the pieces of an operating system required to support a particular application and any other third-party components contained in the appliance. This makes the appliance smaller, more efficient, more secure, and offers better performance than an application running under a full, general-purpose operating system.

As the name suggests, “LimeJeOS” itself is not an appliance or an operating system; it is just the base for various possible appliances. LimeJeOS contains just the very basic parts of an operating system. The major goal is to make the system as small as possible while providing the possibility to install additional software. A LimeJeOS system itself is not very useful without additional packages. Besides an editor (a stripped version of vi) it just contains a package manager that allows the actual applications to be installed. Of course all the usual repositories can be used for that purpose; just with a regular, full-size Linux distribution.

So, just enough openSUSE to run an application, and no more. I hope we’ll be seeing lots of appliances based on openSUSE in the near future.