Smeegol is a precious Linux netbook UI

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Netbooks are apparently still a hot target for Linux vendors. The Novell backed openSUSE effort this week launched their latest netbook UI effort called Smeegol (yeaah you know the LOR reference..).

Smeegol is an effort to bring MeeGo to openSUSE and at first glance it sure looks...precious.. to me.

“Users are able to
pull from the full openSUSE ecosystem for applications, using
repositories on the Build Service and other 3rd party repositories,” openSUSE developer Andrew Wafaa wrote in a mailing list posting. “Moreover, thanks to SUSE Studio anyone can now easily create a
customized Smeegol based OS from a convenient web interface.”

The integration with SUSE Studio is the part that makes Smeegol very attractive to me (and no, I’m no normally attracted to such wretched middle-earth creatures). It basically means that I can build a custom Smeegol distro for my own use case whenever I want. For those that just want to try it out, there is already a Smeegol appliance pre-built.

The customization that SUSE Studio enabled could make Smeegol a really interesting approach for those that want to deploy to netbooks but haven’t (yet) figured out a good approach.

Yes, I know, Ubuntu has their own slick Unity interface for netbooks now too, but they don’t (yet) have the same simple to use/deploy online custom appliance builder tech that SUSE Studio already delivers, now with Smeegol.