This last week we got a chance to sit down and talk to some of the folks behind Suse Studio and the openSUSE Build Service — two of the coolest projects currently happening in the Linux world (and two that deserve far more attention from the press than they are currently getting).

For the uninitiated, here’s the quick 1,000 foot view:

openSUSE Build Service - Take your Linux application.  Put it on their server.  Have their server farm create packages for you for Suse, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc… and it will even provide a repository and download locations for you (so your users can download directly from their servers).  Thus saving countless hours of manually (or semi-manually) building packages for each distro yourself… and saving money on bandwidth.

Suse Studio - A (gorgeous) website that allows you to build your own “appliance”.  Essentially this is a web-based Linux Distro builder.  Add and remove packages.  Change out logos and artwork.  Generate VMWare images, ISO’s, etc.  And there’s even a feature that allows you to test out your pending changes to your new custom distro… right from the website (without downloading a thing).  Awesome.

And today those crazy kids have stepped it up even further with the unveiling of Suse Gallery, which catalogs and showcases the distros/appliances people build with Suse Studio.

Think the possibilities through for a moment.

Let’s say you are a software developer.  You’ve just made an awesome application for Linux.

Now you can set up the openSuse Build Service to build and create the repositories for you.  Then you can go in to Suse Studio and build a custom Linux distro that is focused on showcasing your application (a good way for people to take a big application for a spin).  You can then point people to Suse Gallery to download that full distro to try it out… all from the Suse servers.  And it’s all free.

To go along with the launch of Suse Gallery, they have created “The Disters” awards.

The idea is simple.  $10,000 goes to the most innovative distro/appliance built with Suse Studio (and published to Suse Gallery).  There are two categories: “Open Source” and “Commercial”.  Check here for more details.

All in all this is some of the coolest stuff going on right now.  These projects offer an awesome amount of power for software developers, distro makers, IT guys, power users, etc… and all for free.  Hats off to the team working on these projects.  Incredible job.

On today’s Jupiter Files: A man claims aliens are targeting him with meteorites, Poltergeists are haunting Hollywood publicists, video from the recent Chinese UFO sightings… and pictures of some rather creepy creatures from the depths of the ocean.

If you want the latest episode every weekday, check out this page.

A little less than a year ago we reviewed Haiku Release 1 Alpha 1 and it was pretty damned impressive.

At the time, this open source re-implementation of BeOS, held a great deal of promise: It was fast, visually clean and surprisingly full featured for an “Alpha 1″ release of any operating system (certainly more polished than early alpha/beta releases of Windows or MacOS X tend to be).

Sure, the catalog of applications available for Haiku was small (roughly the same as the applications available for BeOS, as one of Haiku’s goal is to be both binary and source compatible with BeOS… which means most BeOS application should run properly out of the box) — but usability, performance and system features (such as the ability to easily set the priority of any threads within any running application with just a few mouse clicks) made Haiku  (even at Alpha 1) an incredibly enticing choice as a desktop OS… and even more enticing as a way to power Netbooks.

With one glaring problem: No WiFi.

Nearly a year later, we finally get our grubby little hands on Alpha 2… And what are we greeted with?  Oh yes.  Haiku now has Wireless networking support.

It may not be fully featured at this point (it has no WPA support for wireless networks), but the existence of this feature makes Haiku a viable way to power your laptops and netbooks.

Of course, the first thing I did was try to boot Haiku on my Asus Eee 900.  And… it didn’t fully boot.  This was, to say the least, disappointing.

After talking with other Haiku users, and asking around on the Haiku Forum, I came to the conclusion that my particular model wasn’t going to work currently.  A bummer, but I can get over that.  (Though I did come away with the general feeling that the Haiku user community was quite helpful and welcoming.)

And, luckily, I had a few other machines I could test out Haiku with (including my trusty HP Mini 1000 netbook, which ran Haiku splendidly), in addition to running Haiku in VMWare (which works wonderfully, there are even ready to go official VMWare images to allow you to take Haiku for a risk-free trial run).

Once I was up and running with Haiku Alpha 2 I immediately noticed something: Not much had changed.

At least not much that was immediately apparent.  If you take a look at the release notes for Alpha 2, you’ll notice that it isn’t filled with many wiz-bang features — but many smaller items that add up to a substantial improvement over the first release.

Items such as USB mass storage performance, fixes for UDF support and improved localization support complement the countless number of bug fixes that accompany this release.

One of the few distinctly noticeable additions is a brand new WebKit based web browser called WebPositive — which I found to be fast, stable and plenty full featured for the majority of web browsing needs.  With two big exceptions: No Flash and no full HTML5 support.

This, of course, makes watching video online a bit of a problem.  But, aside from that (and, hopefully, HTML5 support will appear sooner than later), the web surfing experience in Haiku with WebPositive is excellent.

So Haiku is fast.  Stable.  Nerdy.  Fun to use.  Visually pleasant.  Virus free.

But where does that leave us?  Is it a system that I would use in place of Linux, Windows or MacOS X?

For a general web browsing, email, word processing, retro-gaming (some great emulators are available) machine… yes.  Absolutely.

For a cool system to tinker around, and be generally nerdy, with… without hesitation.

At this point there are only three issues that need to be resolved before Haiku can be easily recommended to anyone for a working machine:

1) Either full HTML5 or Adobe Flash need to be available within the default web browser.

2) Continued improvement of general hardware compatibility and WiFi support.

3) More third party software.

It’s a tall order, to be sure.  But one that I believe the Haiku team can accomplish.  (In fact, I’m so confident in that, I’ve already announced that the next version of Illumination Software Creator will build Haiku applications.)

For me, Haiku isn’t posed to replace Linux on my desktop any time soon.  But on a netbook or a secondary machine?  Absolutely.

This review?  Written and posted in Haiku.

Todays Jupiter Files covers the EU Parliament UFO Documents.  The page over at Jupiter Broadcasting seems to be having some technical issues(never fear, we’ll have that fixed soon), but you can watch the episode here.

This Friday we’ll be taking your calls on the weeks topics (or any topic you wish so long as it’s interesting!) at 7am Pacific Time over at http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/live.  And, of course, you can tune in at that very same location, at that very same hour, every weekday for that day’s live show.

And so it begins!  Today was the first episode of “Bryan Lunduke’s Jupiter Files”.

Yes, my name is in the title.  And, yes, that was my idea.  What can I say?  I like my name!  (Besides… my ego is ginormous.)

In this first episode, I give a quick little intro to the show and talk about the recent UFO sightings in China… along with some obviously man-made (but very cool looking) crop formations.

The show is live, Monday through Friday, at 7am Pacific Time (That’s 10am Eastern, 2pm GMT).  You can watch it (and hang out in the chat room) over at http://jupiterbroadcasting.com/live.  If you miss an episode, you can download them from http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/.

Video RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ldf-video

MP3 RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ldf-mp3

And, yes, the show is in black and white.