What is "automatix"

Automatix Inc., founded in January 1980, was the first company to market industrial robots with built-in machine vision. Its founders were Victor Scheinman, inventor of the Stanford arm; Phillippe Villers, Michael Cronin, and Arnold Reinhold of Computervision; Jake Dias and Dan Nigro of Data General; Gordon VanderBrug, of NBS, Donald L. Pieper of General Electric and Norman Wittels of Clark University.

Automatix is a tool designed to automate the addition of applications, codecs, fonts and libraries not provided directly by the software repositories of Debian-based distributions (specifically Debian, MEPIS and Ubuntu).

These distributions do not include certain packages or configuration settings that allow the playing of DVDs or MP3 files or the viewing of Adobe Flash content, for example. Packages that allow the playing of MP3s are available to download from official sources but cannot be included on the CD. Packages to enable the playing of DVDs include the libdvdcss algorithm. Although adding these manually is possible, it can be time consuming. This is a particular problem for distributions aimed at simplifying the desktop Linux experience.