Feburary
Blogposts
Creating Graphical Shells – Try Mir in a Virtual Machine describes setting up a Multipass VM and running a variety of Mir display servers in it.
Build smart displays with mir 2.3.2. Mir release 2.3.2 focused on improving the desktop experience and particularly working with X11 based applications. This includes basic cut & paste now working for X11 based application and HiDPI support for X11 applications.
While testing Mir 2.3 across distros I posted an image of egmde running on Fedora:
March
A bit of nostalgia: Egmde - taking a drive on Ubuntu 16.04
May
Reworked the configuration logic for the egmde snap. This means that the most common configuration options are now documented in the default ~/.config/egmde.config file.
June
Mir release 2.4.0 brought no big features for end users, but fixed a number of bugs and cleaned up our “platform” interfaces.
Confined desktop - proof of concept shows the feasibility of running a desktop shell as a fully confined snap.
August
The graphics-core20 Snap interface marked the start of our work to enable IoT snaps to work on non-mesa based gbm-kms drivers.
Running Mir servers over VNC describes a “Heath Robinson” approach to using Mir as a remote desktop. (This is not fit for production, but explores the possibilities.)
October
Ubuntu Frame
Canonical launches Ubuntu Frame, the foundation for embedded displays an evolution of Mir-kiosk. Compared to Mir-kiosk Ubuntu Frame has easier configuration, support for a wider range of driver stacks and is the focus of other developments later in the year.
To go with the launch we provided various supporting documentation.
- A “datasheet”
- Where does ubuntu-frame work?
- Running on your device
- Running in a VM
- Running on your desktop
Mir
Mir release 2.5.0 got support for on screen keyboards and worked around some problems with Electron’s Wayland support.
November
Ubuntu Frame
November featured a webinar on Ubuntu Frame and a short demo video:
There’s also a new wiki about developing “IoT graphics” along with a longer video working through the development steps.
December
Ubuntu Frame OSK
On-screen keyboard support in Ubuntu Frame: Our On Screen Keyboard snap for Ubuntu Frame was promoted to “stable”.
Mir
Mir release 2.6.0 with better support for non-Mesa based gbm-kms stacks and a more flexible API for shells that want to control the Wayland extensions available to specific clients.