Hey everyone!

As this week’s guest blogger, I feel really honored to have this opportunity to share my thoughts and experiences with the SoC community. Thanks Ruiwen and Juliana for inviting me!

Let me start with a self-introduction. I’m James Tan, currently working as a software engineer at Novell’s SUSE Labs in Germany. This is where most of the people responsible for SUSE Linux are based in, though there are many others located in sites all over the world.

Some of you may not be familiar with the SUSE Linux operating system, so let me digress for a minute to give some background. The first version of SUSE Linux started off as the German translation of Slackware Linux back in 1992. Over the years, it grew quickly to become one of the most popular Linux distributions in Europe, particularly for top supercomputers. In 2004, Novell acquired SUSE Linux. It now exists in five main flavours: openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Real Time, Desktop, and Thin Client. By the way, openSUSE 11.1 was just released recently, so do give it a shot! Too bad that I missed the release party this time round (was on vacation).

Ok enough about that, back to me now. I’m in the SUSE Incubation team and we’re currently working on SUSE Studio – a web service that makes it really quick and easy to create your own custom Linux distributions. I’ll talk more about that in a later post.

Incidentally, our team is hiring. If you’re interested, check out our jobs page for both internship and full-time positions. Alternatively you can apply through the National Infocomm Scholarship (NIS) or Enhanced Learning in Infocomm Technology (ELITe) programmes. That’s how I ended working for Novell / SUSE (through the NIS program). More on that later.

I'm not a fan of long blog posts, so I'm going to end here. Looking forward to your questions and suggestions in the comments!