Aurora SPARC Linux is an operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

, based on Fedora Core

Fedora (operating system)

Fedora is a RPM-based, general purpose collection of software, including an operating system based on the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat...

, for SPARC

SPARC

SPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987....

-based computers. Aurora was originally created after Red Hat

Red Hat

Red Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....

 dropped support for the SPARC architecture after Red Hat Linux 6.2.

The name derives from the internal Sun

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

 codename for the SPARCStation 5 chassis.

Since Aurora is derived from Fedora, and most of its developers are located in the US, it only maintains packages legally distributable in the United States.

Feature

• Aurora contains special utilities that are specific to the SPARC hardware line, such as audioctl, lssbus, silo.
• While SPARC has supported 64-bit processing since the ULTRA series, the SPARC distribution uses a 32-bit kernel.

Version history

Like Fedora (and Red Hat Linux before that), Aurora names all of its releases.

Version	Name	Date
Build 0.1	?	November 5, 2001
Build 1.0 (stable, based on Red Hat Linux 7.3)	Ansel	January 19, 2003
Build 1.91	Wombat	May 29, 2004
Build 1.92	Tangerine	November 20, 2004
Build 2.0 (stable, based on Fedora Core 3)	Kashmir	April 14, 2006

Repositories of extra software

Like Fedora Core, Aurora only includes a core set of packages. For downloading and installing programs or codec

Codec

A codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream or signal. The word codec is a portmanteau of "compressor-decompressor" or, more commonly, "coder-decoder"...

s not distributed with Aurora, there are several repositories

Software repository

A software repository is a storage location from which software packages may be retrieved and installed on a computer.- Discussion :Many software publishers and other organizations maintain servers on the Internet for this purpose, either free of charge or for a subscription fee...

available.

Official repositories

Currently only Aurora Extras has an official status. This repository supports the currently released version of Aurora SPARC Linux Build 2.0. Aurora Extras is maintained by a group of volunteers. As a link to Extras is currently included in the base distribution, no extra configuration is required to enable it.

External links

• Official site