The Aurora Team Blog

Having worked on the Aurora installer over Christmas (when time and sobriety allowed ) all Exogenesis screens and widgets have been ported to Gtk/Gdk3. The move caused a few issues, especially with the Gtk part of the Gdu API. Most of these issues have been sorted and custom widgets written to replace those implemented by Gdu-Gtk/2. The core of the Gdu interface ported with no problems.

During the rework we decided to simplify the installer UI, especially when it came to disk partitioning. This has a couple of simple options:

- Take over complete hard disk – Will delete the existing schema, create a partition schema based on a series of space/RAM calculations. Basically implementing a Root/Home/Swap schema.
- Alongside – Will resize the available space and create a schema as above.
- Advanced – Will allow you to repartition the disk however you see fit.

The core code has or is currently in the processes of rationalisation to make it easier for other developers to pick up.

There is still an option to backup all users and groups complete with Home folders to USB disk if you do choose to take over the entire drive. If this option is chosen then data is copied back from the USB disk into the appropriate home folders at the end of the installation process. It is hoped that this will help those that didn’t have /HOME on a separate partition to move over to Aurora without losing data. The USB disk needs to be at least the size of everything under /HOME. As passwords are not copied, user accounts copied from a previous version have the password reset to “aurora” and the password change flag set. Users will need to change the password at first logon.

If you do fancy lending a code hand then you can grab the latest version from subversion and hack away. Code is in Vala and project managed with Anjuta. There’s a couple of README files that list all the dev libraries you need. If you do pick up some development then please let me know what you’re working on to prevent duplication of effort.

Based on the time spent on this rewrite so far I estimate that there is around 5 weeks of development left before a test release will be available.

I’ve been posting screenshots on Twitter (@preobrazhensky), I’ll post some on this blog as and when things get finished.

Steve.