We first released WebYaST in January this year, but while we did release it under Open Source licensing straight from the get-go, we were so busy working on the SUSE Appliance Program that we could not properly test it to also ship an openSUSE packaged version – yet.
That changed with our newest release, and those of you building openSUSE images in SUSE Studio can now add WebYaST to any build with just another click in the selections, as James Tan documented in exquisite snapshotting detail in his blog post.
Internally, we have been mostly focusing on Appliance use, albeit with increasingly frequent forays into the land of more general-purpose Enterprise system administration. While the current release is quite complete for its Appliance Toolkit use case, it still has a way to go to match the completeness provided by “classic YaST” to openSUSE users. While over time the array of modules will steadily grow, there are two remarks that I want to make today: for one, WebYaST is to me an extremely exciting bit of configuration and monitoring software, not just because of its elegant look and web-based interface, but particularly because of the cleverness of simplified interaction in some modules (take a spin of the Firewall module to see exactly what I mean). The second bit is that, because of WebYaST’s newness, the space is ripe for Contributors with creative ideas to come in with Community modules: access to configuration and monitoring features over a Web UI is a powerful mixture, especially when combined with the rise of Smartphone and Tablet computing we are seeing… just a thought I wanted to leave your fertile minds with!
Some documentation to oil your synapses 🙂 Happy Hacking! -F2
