I always wanted to try Aurox Linux, but never had enough motivation to do it, especially since it's KDE-based, and I'm not a KDE guy. I also knew it's based on Red Hat (Aurox 9 was binary-compatible with RH9) and FC3/FC4, but its development seemed a little stalled for a while. And what is that Aurora has and Fedora Core has not?

Even if I don't understand Polish, I noticed recently that its Polish page features the box mockup that starts this post, and also this page says something about Aurox 12.0 on 3 DVDs, but I couldn't tell what :-)

The English page and the French page are rather quiet, with the French one offering Aurox 11.1, which is already 5 months old.

A last note on the French forum announces that Aurox 12.0 Beta1 (DVD) is available here. Not bad, eh?

NOTE: These guys being in connection with Linux+ Magazine, whose most active edition (apart from the original Polish one) is the French one, it's no surprise that you will not find the latest news in English!

What you can actually download as the most recent (post-alpha) disc images:

• aurox-12.0-beta1-install-dvd.iso (3.7 GB)
• aurox-12.0-beta-2.iso (700 MB)
• 12.0-RC1.iso (1.6 GB)

Strange enough, the Beta2 is a single CD, and the first Release Candidate is less than half the size of the Beta1!

If you notice that on the DVD dated July 18 and labeled "Aurox-12.0-RC1", /extras/Elephants_Dream_1024.avi is a 425 MB movie, you might find it very intriguing.

That's why I decided to give it a try.

What is Aurox 12.0-RC1 DVD? First of all, it's a LiveDVD, and an installable one (à la MEPIS, Ubuntu 6.06, and so on).

At the boot prompt, inspecting the available options, I entered:My options were simply ignored, and Aurox entered under X in 1600x1200 at 75Hz!

Based on kernel 2.6.17-1.2139_FC5 (i686), its FC5 origin is pretty obvious, no matter the welcome page after the install will still mention FC3 and FC4:

Aurox 12.0 New Technology is a new version of european Gnu/Linux distribution.

Aurox 12.0 is based on Fedora Core 3. It uses some parts from this system and the newest updates and fixes. Some most important parts of the distribution (hardware detection and configuration tools, X Server, configuration tools, server applications) come from Fedora Core 4.

The system you've just installed has a lot of additional applications, improvements and fixes which make Aurox different from Fedora.

The tested DVD only includes KDE 3.5.3-0.2.fc5, but GNOME 2.14 is in the repositories.


Notice that the LiveDVD configuration features a two-panel KDE, with KDE menus both on the top panel and on the bottom one, which is highly unusual. If in a world where some distros (SuSE 10.1, SLED10) are trying to make GNOME look like KDE, there is somebody else (Aurox 12) trying to make KDE to look like GNOME, then this is the best news I could imagine! (Kudos anyway, it's a nice layout.)

My only problem with their menus is the overall complexity. Even if both my Ethernet adapters were up and running, I couldn't find anything related to the ADSL configuration in the menus, so I fired a Konsole: /usr/bin/system-config-adsl did exactly NOTHING, but /usr/sbin/adsl-setup just worked!

Or most of it. /usr/sbin/adsl-start brought ppp0 up, but the DNS discovery was not performed, so I had to edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ppp0 for turningintoThen it was about /sbin/service network restart.

Note that this configuration will be copied by the Aurox installer on your HDD, so you shouldn't bother later anymore.

A funny thing for me was the presence of a working "Same GNOME 2.14.2", whereas Klotski failed to start!

Back to our multimedia sample, the Elephants Dream open-source movie: it played smoothly in Kaffeine, even if it was an AVI:


OTOH, among the links on the desktop, there is one set for downloading and installing the "essential" MPlayer codecs:
I guess it's install time now!

While dealing with partitions, I hope you'll be able to ignore some Polish untranslated parts, as the whole process is a piece of cake anyway:


The only minor glitch was to see that after 25 minutes, it seemed to be stuck at 99% for another 15 minutes, while copying from the DVD however. 40' for an install is not that bad for a LiveDVD, I guess.


What do you get after the reboot?

A fully working KDE system, with some polish needed, so I can only hope they will have an RC2 before the final release.

GRUB ignored any other existing partitions, the only entry being the one for Aurox. I was able to fix this to point to the original menu on my Debian partition (/dev/hda4) by running:("/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda" was not necessary, as GRUB was already functional.)

Of course I added the menu entry for Aurora into my old /boot/grub/menu.lst on the Debian partition too.

If you don't need to change anything in GRUB, you might still want to change its theme from the ugly "Circles" to "Bluecurve".

The first problems with the installed Aurox RC?

• The only user was root, and this is passwordless! One should add a regular user and disable the login as root ASAP!
• In the installed KDE, only the top panel is available, but the taskbar is on the bottom one, so you're left with the minimized windows in the nirvana (so to speak)! One should add an External Taskbar at the bottom. Beware that the configuration is not saved by default, or at least the bottom taskbar disappeared after a logout in my case!

Otherwise, the installed desktop is cleaner, without extra Web links, and if you have the taskbar too, it's a very usable one:


In the LiveDVD, USB sticks worked perfectly, but in the installed version, you can't access them, even as root:


As it seems, Aurox tries to mount the USB stick on "/", which is definitely not what it should try:

Without further exploring this issue, I just mounted it manually:(after having created the mounting point)

From the package management point of view, there is yum (but not yumex), and Fedora's new friend, Pirut 1.0.3!


/etc/yum.repos.d/aurox12_base.repo is rather limited for the moment:The full list of available RPMs is here: aurox-12.0-RPMS.lst.

I can't guarantee, but using packages for FC5 should be successful in many situations, should you add extra repositories. The only annoyance is the extreme laziness of Pirut, but this is exactly the case with FC5 too.

The bottom line after a very brief contact with an unknown Polish lady?

I was quite impressed by "her", although some inconsistencies still have to be fixed. This include the contradiction between the facts and the welcome page, who still states that GNOME is the default graphical environment, while actually KDE is the primary one since Aurox 11.0. which was launched exactly one year ago (Aug. 11, 2005).

I am not sure what's the intended audience for Aurox, but given their emphasis on "Synaptics touchpad driver, Swsusp2, ipw2100, ipw2200, ndiswrapper", we can assume the laptop users are among the first considered.

The major asset for Aurox 12.0 is however the installable DVD concept, which might want to target:

• users of SuSE, who already had an installable DVD (10.0 worked excellent), especially
  KDE aficionados;
• users of FC5, who don't have a LiveDVD, duh...

For a GNOME user like me, congratulations go to the Aurox team for their choice to:

• configure KDE with two panels, à la GNOME;
• configure KDE/Konqueror with double-click activation, not single-click activation (which I hate).

Another distinctive asset of Aurox 12.0 will be the 3-DVD release: it's important to have all the repositories available offline! Fedora and Ubuntu don't have it, so users in need of such an availability have to rely on the Canadians.

Should Aurox release this fall, it'll be a heck of a hot indian summer...

UPDATE, Aug. 13: Thanks to a reader from Poland (Pesto), I went to Distrorankings.com, where I could find an announcement in plain English (here and here), dated 2006-08-10: «The Aurox Core Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Aurox 12.0. Aurox 12.0 ('New Technology') is based on Fedora Core 5 distribution.»

So 12.0 final is actually out, should you understand enough Polish to be able to buy the magazine following some link from this page which is double Dutch to me :-)

A last note: even if you have to pay for the magazine (this French section only shows Aurox 11.1 for EUR 10.80), as long as you can install it on an unlimited number of PCs, this is still acceptable: "Aurox is based on GPL licence so that you may copy and install it on so many workstations as you wish without any additional payments."

The sad part of it is the Distrowatch Aurox page, currently outdated.

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