OpenGL based display management system ‘Wayland’ – the X Window System replacement proposed for future versions of Ubuntu – has been made available in the Ubuntu 11.04 Repositories.
Natty testers curious to try it out – see below for caveats on doing so – need only search for ‘Wayland’ in the Ubuntu Software Centre.
After installation it can be launcher from the command line using ‘wstart‘.
Caveats
“I don’t imagine this to be of any use to end users.” cautions Canonical’s Bryce Harrington in the initial mailing list announcement on Wayland’s availability in Ubuntu 11.04.
“My hope is that the availability of this package makes it that much easier for toolkit and app developers to experiment with Wayland on Ubuntu.”
Supported drivers
What does it work with? Harrington says:
“I’ve tested this works on -intel and -ati. Should work on -nouveau too but I’ve not tested it yet. Won’t work with proprietary drivers afaik.”
What’s Wayland?
Wayland is a lightweight display server for the GNU/Linux desktop. Started by Intel OSTC member Kristian Høgsberg.
In Kristian’s own words: –
“every frame is perfect… applications will be able to control the rendering enough that we’ll never see tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker”