Aurora Documentation

Aurora is a KDE desktop experience designed for reliability and low-maintenance usage. You can download the Aurora images directly from the official website.

https://getaurora.dev

For further guidance, community discussions, and technical details, use the following resources:

• Official Documentation: https://docs.getaurora.dev/
• Discussions and Announcements: GitHub Discussions (strongly recommended)
• Contributing Guide: Universal Blue Contributing Guide
• Local Building Guide: Building Aurora locally

Aurora supports Secure Boot by default. During the initial installation, you will be prompted to enroll the secure boot key in the BIOS. When prompted, enter the password: universalblue.

If you missed this step during setup, you can manually enroll the key using the ujust utility or mokutil.

When performing system updates or rechunking operations that involve removing /etc/gshadow, follow this specific sequence to ensure /etc/group and /etc/gshadow are populated correctly:

1. Remove the existing shadow file: rm /etc/gshadow
2. Generate system users/groups: systemd-sysusers (this populates /etc/group)
3. Fix group permissions: Run rechunker-group-fix (this populates /etc/gshadow with missing entries)
4. Apply tmpfiles configuration: systemd-tmpfiles --create --remove --boot --exclude-prefix=/dev

To enroll the custom Aurora public key prior to installation or a rebase, download the public key from the akmods repository and run the following commands:

Note: Replace public_key.der with the actual path to the downloaded file.

sudo mokutil --timeout -1
sudo mokutil --import public_key.der

If Secure Boot was not configured during the initial installation, run the following command in your terminal to enroll the key:

ujust enroll-secure-boot-key

The rechunker-group-fix script is a utility designed to synchronize /etc/gshadow with /etc/group. It ensures that every group defined in /etc/group has a corresponding entry in /etc/gshadow with a placeholder password field (!*::). This is typically used in environments where /etc/gshadow has been removed or nuked to facilitate rechunking/image updates.

To use this script correctly, it should be part of a sequence within a systemd service to ensure the system identity files are properly reconstructed.

# Recommended execution sequence within a systemd service:
rm /etc/gshadow
systemd-sysusers
rechunker-group-fix
systemd-tmpfiles --create --remove --boot --exclude-prefix=/dev

The aurora-zfs-deprecation-notifier is a system utility used to notify active users about the upcoming deprecation of ZFS support in Aurora (scheduled for October 2026). When executed, it identifies all non-root users currently logged into the system via loginctl and sends a critical desktop notification to each user's session using notify-send via machinectl.

/usr/bin/aurora-zfs-deprecation-notifier