Mir News

I’ve decided to change the name of our round-up post. (I think “This Week in Mir” is misleading.)

ppa:mir-team/dev

We’ve had some interesting developments landing on master.

Support for xdg-shell (stable)

This work by @wmww will make it easy to use Mir with the current and future generations of client toolkits.

This work by @wmww will make it easy to use Mir with the current and future generations of client toolkits. Partial Nvidia support has landed

This isn’t everything yet. @raof has got the “platform” working, so Mir can run on Nvidia drivers. But we still needs to complete wiring up the support for GL clients.

This isn’t everything yet. @raof has got the “platform” working, so Mir can run on Nvidia drivers. But we still needs to complete wiring up the support for GL clients. A mechanism to configure Wayland extension protocols

This allows shell developers and deployers to specify which extension protocols to enable.

We’ve also fixed a few bugs.

There are two things “of interest” that have not progressed:

X11 support

The core team has not got to this yet. What exists is a community contribution by @mariogrip. This remains “experimental” as there are outstanding issues to resolve before it is ready.

The core team has not got to this yet. What exists is a community contribution by @mariogrip. This remains “experimental” as there are outstanding issues to resolve before it is ready. Remote desktop support

The core team has not got to this yet. But there are a couple of community efforts in this space: https://github.com/MirServer/mir/issues/467 “Remote desktop support” https://forums.ubports.com/topic/1389/reverse-convergence-view-control-your-phone-from-computer-like-vnc-rdp

The core team has not got to this yet. But there are a couple of community efforts in this space:

snapcraft

The mir-kiosk snap is being used with positive feedback in the form of feature requests.

The egmde snap has proved useful

The availability of an easy to install Mir desktop led to some good bug reports by @GizmoChicken who tested Mir on some configurations the Mir team did not have to hand.

There are still a few “bumps” in the story of developing client snaps. @greyback has been working on progressing these.

Snaps and sharing Mir’s Wayland socket

With the benefit of feedback and hindsight we can improve the way that Wayland clients connect to Wayland servers when both are confined snaps. This work will pave the way for them to “autoconnect”.

With the benefit of feedback and hindsight we can improve the way that Wayland clients connect to Wayland servers when both are confined snaps. This work will pave the way for them to “autoconnect”. The way that the GL stack is deployed is problematic

Currently both servers and clients need to contain drivers for every device they run on. The discussions about how best to avoid this are ongoing.

Currently both servers and clients need to contain drivers for every device they run on. The discussions about how best to avoid this are ongoing. Developing Xwayland based clients requires enabling the experimental “layouts” core feature

Hopefully this will ship soon.

Desktop

There’s a recent announcement by lubuntu that they plan to migrate to using Mir: “… We are going to do this by porting Openbox to use the Mir display server, Drew DeVault’s QtLayerShell, and other associated bits.” A great choice!

Phone

One of the UBports developers has started work on updating their “android” Mir platform to the current version of Mir.

When complete this will enable them to run a modern (Wayland capable) Mir on the phone with obvious benefits to their goal of supporting desktop applications.