Mir 1.5.0 Release

[alan_g]

Mir 1.5.0 Release

We’re pleased to announce the release of Mir 1.5.0.

For Ubuntu, Mir is available from the Mir PPAs:

New Mir PPAs for Ubuntu

We have three PPAs for Mir, all three will builds for the supported Ubuntu series (currently 16.04 LTS “Xenial”, 18.04LTS “Bionic”, 19.04 “Disco” and 19.10 “Eoan”) as well as the current development (20.04 “Focal”). PPA To add The “Release” PPA is the recommendation for most purposes and contains the release version of Mir. sudo add-apt-repository --update ppa:mir-team/release The “Release Candidate” PPA contains the release candidate code of Mir. sudo add-apt-repository --update ppa…

It is also available as a source tarball.

Community contributions

We have a contribution from community member @pajn allowing the window manager the option to clip windows to a specified area. @pajn also fixed a problem with the placement of “layer shell” windows when using multi monitor.

Snapcraft

My work with snapd and snapping Mir led to a couple of small enhancements that mean we can now drop the legacy mir interface from confined Mir snaps and, once the snapd work completes we can launch other snaps from a confined server.

Wayland

@sophie-w has continued to progress the Wayland support needed for MATE with a number of bugfixes. This work with MATE has largely moved away from Mir:

Porting MATE Apps to Wayland

As some of you may know, the Mir team and the MATE Desktop team have been working together for some time to bring MATE to Wayland with Mir. We’ve demonstrated a proof of concept (which you can try with the mate-wayland snap), but there’s still considerable work to be done before we have a MATE session suitable for daily use. One of the largest pieces of work is arguably the simplest: porting the normal applications. The functionality of Caja, MATE Terminal, Pluma, etc should all be possible usi…

Graphics platforms

@raof has been working on the vc4 platform for Raspberry Pi. That hasn’t landed in time for this release, but has led to a lot of internal clean-up of the platform support in Mir.

Arch

It seems an update to Protobuf on Arch broke the build recently. That’s now fixed, hopefully also for any other distros that saw this problem.

Changelog

ABI summary:

• mirserver ABI bumped to 51

Enhancements:

• [snapcraft] Update shared memory handling to work both in confined snaps without the “mir” interface and on pre-3.11 kernels.
• Split arch-specific part of libmirwayland-dev into a -bin package
• [MirAL] Allow clipping windows to a specified area
• [MirAL] Add application_id surface property
• [MirAL] Make it possible for Mir based servers to set up the environment variables for launching clients
• Fixes for new Protobuf on Arch
• [Renderer] Also log supported EGL and GL extensions
• [Wayland] Bump xdg output to v3 (workaround an Xwayland problem on eoan)

Bugs fixed:

• [MirAL] Can get the Mir window of a layer shell surface. (Fixes #963)
• [Wayland] Send wl_buffer.release on the Wayland thread. (Fixes #951)
• Set output_id for LayerShell surfaces & clean up and test attached windows on outputs. (Fixes: #980)
• [MirAL] Move maximized windows when output is unplugged (Fixes #853)
• [Wayland] Fix crashes in wayland::OutputManager when output is unplugged
• PixelSource::read() should execute the supplied block. (Fixes #1009)
• [build] Fix non-mesa builds.
• [Wayland] Resync keyboard state after server is paused. (Fixes #999)
• [Wayland] Convert buffer stream to cursor images in wl_pointer. (Fixes #1000)

[alan_g]

mir-kiosk

The mir-kiosk snap has been tested and updated to Mir 1.5

Using mir-kiosk

Graphics on Ubuntu Core On Ubuntu Core a recommended way to get graphical applications running is to use mir-kiosk: snap install mir-kiosk Running mir-kiosk on your desktop is convenient for experimentation and testing snaps under development: Applications on mir-kiosk Mir supports applications using the Wayland protocol. That means applications using many of the popular toolkits including GTK3, Qt5 and SDL2. There are some “kiosk” snaps in the store, the ones I’ve tried and can recomme…

mir-test-tools

Mir-test-tools as a snap

For a long time now we have had test tools that help with device bring-up and with ensuring that we can run our example applications. Until now that has been available as the mir-test-tools package. However, this doesn’t “play nice” with Ubuntu Core and as a result I’ve been been working to repackage the mir-test-tools as a snap and make it available in the snap store. I’m pleased to announce a release candidate of the mir-test-tools snap. This makes it easy to run the following tests: sudo …

[Conan_Kudo]

Mir 1.5.0 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 29+. It should become available in the next 24 hours or so.