Canonical developers who are in charge of Mir's project, they made known Few days ago releasing the new version Mir display server 1.6, version in which the developers worked to improve and optimize the performance with Wayland.
For those who do not know Mir should know that this is a display server whose development is continued by Canonical, despite the rejection of the development of the Unity Shell and the Ubuntu edition for smartphones. Mir is still in demand in canonical projects and now is positioned as a solution for embedded devices and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Mir can be used as a composite server for Wayland, allowing you to run any application that uses Wayland in Mir-based environments (for example, those built with GTK3 / 4, Qt5, or SDL2).
What's new in Mir 1.6?
In the new version of Mir 1.6 as mentioned, This version comes with the optimizations and improvements for the performance of the code related to Wayland, Besides that added a new Wayland graphics platform which allows Mir to run as a client under the control of another Wayland composite server (this server can also be the miral-system-composer provided in Mir).
Switching between different sessions is done via Ctrl-Alt-PgUp / Ctrl-Alt-PgDn. This feature remained the last link needed to transfer the UBports / Ubuntu Touch stack from mirclient to Wayland and launch Unity8 as a drive / system / composer client.
Another change that stand out in this new version of Mir 1.6 is the initial implementation of the rpi-dispmanx graphics platform for use on the Raspberry Pi. Composition includes new demo apps mir_demo_client_wayland_egl_spinner and miral-system-composer.
Regarding DispmanX support:
"Interestingly, Canonical is developing the Broadcom DispmanX API for Mir, which may be of interest to corporate customers."
Even though the work about the Dispmanx platform can already be used on a Raspberry Pi, a special image has to be generated to be able to use it. Although this comes as an initial implementation, the Canonical developers mention that they will continue to work to improve the implementation.
Finally, also in the announcement it is mentioned that Mir build issues were fixed on Arch Linux.
If you want to know more about it, you can consult the original publication In the following link.
How to install Mir graphic server in Ubuntu and derivatives?
For those who are interested in being able to install this graphic server on their systems, they should know that Mir's project is not exclusive for Canonical products, since there are some installation packages that are prepared to facilitate installation in Ubuntu 16.04 / 18.04 / 19.04 (with the help of a PPA) and in the same way there are packages prepared for Fedora 29/30.
In the case for those of us who are users of a supported version of Ubuntu, we can add the proposed repository in our systems by following the instructions that we share below.
All they have to do is open a terminal on their systems (they can do it with the key combination Ctrl + Alt + T or with Ctrl + T) and in it we are going to type the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mir-team/release sudo apt-get update
With this, the repository is already added to your system, before installing the graphical server it is fully recommended that if in your system you are using private controllers for your video card or integrated, change these to free drivers, this in order to avoid conflicts.
Once we are sure that we have the free drivers activated, we can install the server by executing in the terminal:
sudo apt-get install mir
At the end you will have to restart your system so that the user session with Mir is loaded and choose this.
On the other hand you can also install any of the other packages:
| Mir demo programs |
|
| Desk table «platform» |
|
| Nvidia 'desktop' platform |
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| MirAL headers and development libraries |
|
You can remove any of the PPAs as follows:
sudo ppa-purge mir-team/dev