Aurora HDR on Linux

June 26, 2024

This is not intended as a step by step guide but it should hopefully point someone in the right direction.

While I haven't been able to get Aurora HDR from Skylum software to run the installer under Wine 8 on Debian 12 I have recently had some success in getting an installation that I copied from Windows to run. And I'm assuming that if you're trying to run Aurora HDR then you initially bought it and ran it on windows.

It was pretty much as simple as using winetricks to install corefonts, d3dcompiler_47, and dotnet48.

winetricks -q corefonts d3dcompiler_47 dotnet48

However, I will caution you that I was doing this in a new WINEPREFIX and if you've already been messing with wine for other things you may have conflicts unless you explicitly create a new WINEPREFIX or you clean out your old one and start from scratch.

After installing core fonts, D3D, and dotnet 4.8... I then copied the “Aurora HDR” installation folder over to my wine-folder's “Program Files” folder with something along the lines of.

cp /mnt/windows/c/Program\ Files/Aurora\ HDR ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/

I then made a .desktop file to launch it.

[Desktop Entry]
Comment=Aurora HDR Image Editor
Exec=wine '~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Aurora HDR/Aurora HDR.exe' %u
Name=Aurora HDR
Path='~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Aurora HDR/'
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Type=Application

As I wanted an icon I used 7zFM.exe – also launched under wine because I couldn't be bothered to find out how to extract from Windows executable files under linux directly – to open the Aurora HDR.exe file as an archive and extracted the icons I found at the locations... “Aurora HDR.exe.rsrc\ICON\”

The 1.ico, 2.ico, 3.ico are all windows icon files but the file just named “4” is a high resolution PNG file so I used that one and renamed it to AuroraHDR.png, copied it to the same folder as the app, and then pointed the desktop file to it.

There are, of course, a few issues.

The custom dialogs it uses for some things, such as when it asks if you want to quit without saving, glitch badly but if you click where a button is supposed to be and keep holding the mouse button down while dragging away from the buttons then the buttons do at least render.

And there are no previews of images in the very-cut-down Wine file select dialog, but I get round that with the %u in the desktop entry and choosing “Open with” from whatever app I'm browsing my images from.

Wishing you luck.

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