Aurora Weekly Update : Week 2
As promised I’m going to try and do a weekly post of a Monday morning to keep you all up to speed on whats been happening for the last week.
We have an unofficial to do list of what we would like completed before releasing a beta into the wild and the good news is that we are well over the 60% mark for this! The majority of this work is left on the installer and we are still working towards making the code available via git for those who are interested in contributing.
Marketing and Media
After a slew of emails , forum discussion and posts on twitter a lot of people would be interested in sharing aurora with their friends and across the net. The suggestions surrounded around the idea of a PR / Marketing team who can help with promotional ideas to spread the Aurora message.
The first idea I’ll be working on this week is the addition of a Marketing Page to the community section of the website. Here you can find out about how easy it is to share Aurora, We will be putting up some blog images, the code to link to your websites, forum banners, promotional wallpapers etc.
I’d like to put a personal thank you to MonkeyAbout too for his brilliant submissions and ideas for this which are all being collated (also looks like his wallpaper submissions are pretty popular too). Once again if your interested in being involved please drop any of the team a PM, contact us via the website or post in the “Get Involved” Forum.
Bug Zapping
This week has been pretty productive in resolving a number of pending issues we had with the simplicity of updating your eb4 beta’s and for Aurora 0.5 .
We have rolled updates to python-apt, python-debian, update-manager, update-notifier and gdebi. The combined result of these is that update manager will now notify you correctly with new updates and not crash as before! Gdebi issues have fixed the default application for debs, and installing dependencies automatically.
GDM3 : Next generation login manager
Another successful bit of work went into the availability of gdm3 into our repo’s. GDM3 is a rewrite of the popular gdm to run on X and be a lot faster than its predecessor. Its now available to download as an optional update : it will remove gdm and replace a couple of other packages too. Once we feel that there are minimal / no issues with the switch we will update the gdm package accordingly so it is rolled to all eb4 users and default on the upcoming beta.
Jupiter : Patch to Synaptics Driver
A useful and needed feature was brought back to Jupiter this week thanks to the successful patch by Fewt to the Synaptics driver. In previous releases we were able to allow the touchpad to rotate to match the rotation of the monitor but this was lost when the patch for earlier releases wasn’t maintained. Fewt has now repackaged the Synaptics drivers with a new patch which has brought this back. Please report any issues with this functionality via the forums as always.
Important Package Changes
The next phase of packaging is to remove excess functions and services from packages to aid in improving the system performance. This has prompted the inclusion of python at version 2.6 , and the depreciation of hal from our package tree. Hal is in the process of being replaced as less and less remains dependent on it. Please report any issues or loss of functionality with any of these updates to ensure we have them covered.
The next major addition to the iso will be the removal of update and the addition of its replacement : SystemD. SystemD is a brilliant init system which enables us the ability to run our boot process in parallel therefore improve boot times substantially. This can be implemented in stages working up to a fast boot for the 0.5 beta release.
And Finally…
We are still working away on the installer but nothing specific to report on this week. Twitter followers are on the rise as is our distrowatch position. We are also now on identi.ca for those who use the service. Keep spreading the Aurora message as we gear up for the first beta!
