The Aurora Team Blog

As everyone is now fully aware of the changes we’ve been through and the new name and brand is now common knowledge, I thought I’d put string a few words together and welcome you all onboard.

Why Change The Name?

The team had been thinking about this for a while, our scope had changed, we had moved away from Ubuntu so the ‘buntu bit seemed a little redundant.  Oh, and we did have a little pressure from Canonical legal who seem to have a monopoly on anything ending ‘buntu. I wonder if everyone in Africa now place a copyright symbol next to the word Ubuntu just in case the legal sharks smell a drop of blood?  Anyway, it was the time to change the name to reflect the changes that this project has had and will continue to go through.

Why Aurora?

A couple of reasons really, Paul and I are both from the North(west) of England and if you take North and the intention to bring a brighter light to the desktop you get  Northern Lights, Aurora Borealis.

The second reason is even more obscure, Aurora was the ship that fired the shot to signal the start of the assault on Winter Castle, St Petersburg, a major step in the 1917 October Russian revolution.  We are hoping that the steps we take in the coming months will be a major step in the desktop Linux revolution.   Oh, and when I proposed it to the team, it was well liked and I know Paul had fun with the scope of graphical possibilities!

Why no community vote on the name?

It was the team’s decision not to hold a vote as it can get very messy and spark lots of arguments and counter arguments.  We needed something really quick so I could register the domains and voting for names usually takes an age.  That said, we’ve had the names registered for quite some time and we were almost rumbled when someone stumbled upon a repo left browsable.  I think the name is quite catchy and has a lot of scope for future developments.  If you disagree then feel free to post in the forum chat section.

Where’s The Iso snail devs?

Everyone that downloaded the eb4 beta is well aware of the problems we had trying to glue the ubiquity installer into the release and the many issues this caused so I started to develop a bespoke installer, first in python then, when I happened upon an old copy of Linux Format and spotted “what on earth is vala”, I started to redevelop in Vala.  It compiles to C code and then gcc compiles the C.  It runs fast, very fast.  But, as with anything relatively new, there are teething problems and I found some libraries didn’t have the api wrappers available, until recently.  The main reason for the long delay is that I drastically underestimated how much code I would have to do!

Hopefully you’re still with me? You are? Good, I’ll add another excuse.  We needed time to fill out the repo’s and test them (work still continuing).  All of these little things add up and hence the long delay.  Don’t worry, we WILL get there. Though I have taken a short break to type this.

What’s The Plan, Stan?

Well, our scope is still broad.  We will release both i386 and x86_64 versions as core.  There will be iterations of these, Netbook, Notebook and Desktop.  Each of those iterations will have a FOSSpot option for those that don’t believe in being pragmatic (sorry, couldn’t resist )  This means that your Netbook WILL be supported.  There will be an ISO spin of the latest packages every quarter but from final release forward you will not need to run a full upgrade every 6 months.  We do understand that this is a huge task but other distro’s have done it and so can we.

Over the next few weeks we will release a roadmap for all the developments planned for this year.  Keep an eye on the blog, twitter, forums for more information.

What about us?

Wasn’t that a Tatu song? Anyway, any major decisions will, from this point forward, be open to community involvement.  A voting system will be used.  This includes opening up votes on your ideas (votes within a specific time frame).  The most popular will be included, developed (please be kind here, the dev team does have a life too ).  Register yourself as the next beta tester and be the first to get your hands on the iso when it’s done.  Andy (Fewt) has posted a blog on the culture of Aurora, have a read and if you’re still not convinced then hang around, you soon will be.

Ok, I’ve read enough, get on with it!

We know some of the plans are highly ambitious but there is a good dev and support team and they are constantly growing.  Get involved, be a part of it, many hands make light work and all that. I can’t promise you fame and fortune but I can promise that there is a great sense of achievement when you are part of team delivering a quality product.

Hopefully you’re still awake, thanks for reading and your patience and support is greatly appreciated. Stick around, you know it makes sense

Steve.

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