Background
Miriway is a starting point for creating a Wayland based desktop environment using Mir.
To make it useful it is necessary to add such things as a launcher, background, panels and other things useful in a graphical shell.
This post is simply to identify a reference “desktop environment” configuration that the Mir team can use for consistency in development and testing. It doesn’t describe building, installing or configuring Miriway (that can be found in the project documentation).
The reference Miriway config
The Miriway project now has an example-configs subdirectory. This contains some scripts for setting up a desktop based on Miriway.
$ ls example-configs
miriway-config-alan_g.bash miriway-config-MATE.bash
These take care of installing additional components and setting up any necessary configuration files.
miriway-config-alan_g.bash
I’m going to propose that we take miriway-config-alan_g.bash as a reference. But note this needs yambar version 1.9, and that’s only in the Ubuntu archive archive from 23.04 on.
| Component | Choice | Shortcut |
|---|---|---|
| background | swaybg | - |
| panel | yambar | - |
| launcher | synapse | Meta-A |
| terminal | kgx | Ctrl-Alt-T |
miriway-config-MATE.bash
This is based on MATE components
| Component | Choice | Shortcut |
|---|---|---|
| background | swaybg | - |
| panel | mate-panel | - |
| launcher | mate-panel | Meta-A |
| terminal | mate-terminal | Ctrl-Alt-T |
Note:
- Mate panel complains of missing widgets on first launch
- Some of the Mate panel options don’t work
- The MATE launcher and terminal run as X11 apps, because otherwise they can’t launch X11 apps (they set
DISPLAY=wayland-0, which is mad)