Egmde on 22.04

Running the edge channel of egmde (to get the latest Mir development version):

The latest Mir development version has support for the Wayland extensions used by screenshotting tools like grim. These need to be enabled in the egmde configuration:

$ grep add-wayland ~/.config/egmde.config 
add-wayland-extensions=zwlr_screencopy_manager_v1:zxdg_output_manager_v1
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Some more tips about using egmde on 22.04

waybar

At the time of writing, the waybar version packaged in the egmde snap comes from the 20.04 archive and fails to run on 22.04. This isn’t hard to work around:

  1. install the current version of waybar
    sudo apt install waybar
  2. change the shell-components line in ~/.config/egmde.config to use waybar directly, not waybar.launcher
    sed -i s#/snap/egmde/current/bin/waybar.launcher#waybar# ~/.config/egmde.config

swaybg

I wanted to use the recent image of Sgt A* as a background. This also needed a bit of workaround.

  1. Download the Sgt A* image.
  2. Set the swaybg.image line in in ~/.config/egmde.config to:
    swaybg.image=/home/alan/Downloads/eso2208-eht-mwa.jpg

If you log into egmde with this configuration the image will be stretched to fit your screen. I didn’t want this, but the launch script didn’t all me to change that. So…

  1. Copy the launch script from to your personal bin directory (I assume you already have a ~/bin)
    cp /snap/egmde/current/bin/swaybg.launcher ~/bin
  2. Edit this to add -m fit to the end of the line starting GDK_BACKEND.
  3. Change the shell-components line in ~/.config/egmde.config to my swaybg.launcher
    sed -i s#/snap/egmde/current/bin/swaybg.launcher#swaybg.launcher# ~/.config/egmde.config

Mir 2.8

Mir 2.8 (currently in testing and on the egmde beta channel) supports some new features.

  1. To use these before the 2.8 release of Mir update egmde:
    snap refresh --beta egmde

Enabling screenshotting with, for example grim

  1. Install grim
    sudo apt install grim
  2. Enable the necessary Wayland extensions:
    echo add-wayland-extensions=zwlr_screencopy_manager_v1:zxdg_output_manager_v1 >> ~/.config/egmde.config

Now you can take a screenshot with grim screenshot.png

Changing the “Mir on X” window title

  1. Supply the title
    echo x11-window-title=egmde >> ~/.config/egmde.config

Turning off the screen after a timeout

  1. Supply the timeout
    echo idle-timeout=600 >> ~/.config/egmde.config

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