Recently the release of the new version of Mir 2.8 was announced in which various bug fixes have been made, in addition to providing support for new versions of Ubuntu and Fedora and improvements related to X11 and Wayland.
For those who do not know about Mir, they should know that there is a screen server that is developed by Canonical, despite the fact that I abandoned the development of the Unity shell and the Ubuntu edition for Smartphones.
Mir still in demand in Canonical projects and now I knowe positions as a solution for embedded devices and Internet of things (IoT). Mir can be used as a composite server for Wayland, allowing any Wayland-based application (eg built with GTK3 / 4, Qt5, or SDL2) to run in Mir-based environments.
The compatibility layer for X, XMir, is based on XWayland, while other parts of the infrastructure used by Mir originate from Android. These parts include the Android input stack and Google's Protocol Buffers. Mir currently runs on a variety of Linux-powered devices, including traditional desktops, IoT, and embedded products.
Main novelties of Mir 2.8
In this new version of Mir 2.8 that is presented, it is highlighted that it was added support for the experimental wlr_screencopy_unstable_v1 protocol extension, which allows to create utilities to create screenshots.
Another of the changes that stands out in this new version is the refactoring of the graphic platform Mir, because in this new version it is mentioned that worked towards hybrid and hetero-GPU environments so much of the graphics platform code and APIs have been refactored.
In addition to this, it is also highlighted that during compilation, code generation with Wayland protocol definitions is provided and that the graphics platform code and API have been redesigned to support future heterogeneous and hybrid GPU environments.
Another change that stands out in this new version is that the “–x11-window-title” option was added to configure the window title on the X11 platform, in addition to the implementation of Mir mounting and testing on systems with RISC-V architecture.
Also note that build validation was provided on experimental branches of Ubuntu 22.10, Ubuntu (kinetic) Fedora Rawhide, Debian Sid and Alpine Edge
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Move the generated protocol code to the build directory
- Allow --app-env-amend to be provided multiple times
- Make window title a configuration option
- Add fatal_error if unable to bind Wayland socket
- Add cast list of supported linkers
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about this new version of Mir, you can check the details In the following link.
How to install Mir on Ubuntu and derivatives?
The installation packages of this new version are prepared for Ubuntu 20.04, 21.10 and 22.04 (PPA) and Fedora 36, 35, 34 and 33.
For those who are interested in being able to install this graphic server on their systems, 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 you are using private drivers on your system 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 you choose this for your session.