A new version of the Mir 1.4 display server has been released, whose development Canonical continues, despite the rejection of the development of Unity Shell and the Ubuntu edition for smartphones. Mir continues to be in demand in projects and is now positioned as a solution for embedded devices and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Mir can be used as a composite server for Wayland, allowing you to run any application that uses Wayland in Mir-based environments (for example, those built with GTK3 / 4, Qt5, or SDL2).
About Mir
For those who do not know Mir, they should know that This is based on EGL and uses part of the infrastructure originally developed for Wayland, such as Mesa's EGL implementation and Jolla's libhybris.
The compatibility layer for X, XMir, is based on XWayland while for the 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.
It enables device manufacturers and desktop users to have a well defined, efficient, flexible and secure platform for their graphical environment.
The project code is distributed under the GPLv2 license.
Main novelties of Mir 1.4
The development of Mir is not as active compared to other similar projects, as it is not one of Canonical's top priorities, although it is not a development that is scrapped like many others.
In this new version of Mir 1.4 enhancements to tools to ensure launch of Wayland applications in shells are highlighted Mir-based extensions have improved support for the wlr-layer-shell (Layer Shell) protocol extension.
On the other hand has been proposed by the developers of the Sway user environment and used in the process of porting the MATE shell to Wayland. The mirrun and mirbacklight utilities have been removed from the package.
On the MirAL layer (Mir Abstraction Layer), which can be used to prevent direct access to Mir server and abstract access to ABI via libmiral library, Support for exclusive zones has been added, restricting the placement of windows to a specific area of ​​the screen.
The first step has been taken to get rid of the specific mirclient API, which has been frozen for a long time and it is recommended to use the Wayland protocol instead.
In the new API version, mirclient is disabled by default, but the assembly option "–enable-mirclient" is left to return it, and for selective activation, the environment variable MIR_SERVER_ENABLE_MIRCLIENT and the configuration file enable- are proposed. mirclient.
The complete removal of the mirclient API is prevented by the fact that it continues to be used by UBports and Ubuntu Touch.
For those interested in knowing a little more about this launch You can check the following link.
How to install Mir graphic server in Ubuntu and derivatives?
For those who are interested in being able to install this graphic server on their systems, they should know that Mir's project is not exclusive for canonical producers, since there are some installation packages that are prepared to facilitate installation in Ubuntu 16.04 / 18.04 / 18.10 / 19.04 (with the help of a PPA) and in the same way there are packages prepared for Fedora 29/30.
In the case for those of us who are users of a supported version of Ubuntu, we can add the proposed repository in our systems by following the instructions that we share below.
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
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 choose this.