Wayland

Wayland is a new windowing protocol for Linux. Utilization of Wayland requires changes to and re-installation of parts of your system's software. For more information on Wayland see its homepage.

Warning: Wayland is under heavy development. Support can not be guaranteed and it may not function as you expect.

Requirements

Currently Wayland will only work with on a system that is utilizing KMS.

Installation

Wayland is most probably installed on your system already as it is an indirect dependency of gtk2 and gtk3. If it is not installed, you will find the wayland package in extra.

Usage

As Wayland is only a library, it is useless on its own. To use it, you need a compositor (like Weston), Weston demo applications, Qt5 with Wayland plugin, and/or GTK+ with Wayland support.

Weston

Installation

You need to install weston from community.

Usage

Now that Wayland and its requirements are installed you should be ready to test it out. Try switching to a terminal and running:

$ weston-launch

Note: You need to be in the video group for Weston to start; this command is not supposed to be run as root and doing that may freeze your VT.

Note: If you get an LLVM assertion failure, you need to rebuild mesa without Gallium LLVM until this problem is fixed. This may imply disabling some drivers which require LLVM.

You may also try exporting the following, if having problems with hardware drivers:

$ export EGL_DRIVER=/usr/lib/egl/egl_gallium.so

It is possible to run Weston inside a running X session:

$ weston

Then at a TTY you can run the demos. To launch a terminal emulator:

$ weston-terminal

To move flowers around the screen:

$ weston-flower 

To test the frame protocol (runs glxgears):

$ weston-gears

To display images:

$ weston-image image1.jpg image2.jpg...

To display PDF Files:

$ weston-view doc1.pdf doc2.pdf...

GUI libraries

(page from official website)

GTK+

You need to install gtk3 from extra, which now has the Wayland backend enabled.

With GTK+ 3.0, GTK+ gained support for multiple backends at runtime and can switch between backends in the same way Qt can with lighthouse.

When both Wayland and X backends are enabled, GTK+ will default to the X11 backend, but this can be overridden by setting the GDK_BACKEND environment variable to wayland.

Remove libcanberra if you get segmentation faults when running gtk applications. A fix for these segfaults has been committed as of 9 Nov 2012, so presumably as soon as 0.31.0 comes out, this should not be necessary anymore. The AUR contains a working git based libcanberra-git^AUR if you want to keep the functionality.

Qt5

You need to install qt5-base and the wayland plugin - qt5-qtwayland-git^AUR.

To run a Qt5 app with the Wayland plugin, set QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland-egl.

Clutter

The Clutter toolkit has a Wayland backend that allows it to run as a Wayland client. The backend is in the master branch of the main repo and can be activated by passing --with-flavour=wayland to the configure script.

SDL

Benjamin Franzke is working on a port of SDL to Wayland, it's available in his sdl-wayland repo on freedesktop.org. Further development upon Benjamins work was done by Andre Heider in his wayland branch of libsdl.

EFL

EFL has complete Wayland support. Please see here for details.

Window managers and desktop shells

KDE

There is early work to make it possible to run KWin (KDE's window manager) on Wayland.

GNOME

GNOME is currently ported to Wayland and will be available in a future version. For details look into the GNOME Wiki.

Pure Wayland

Warning: Some really quick notes on installing a pure (no X11) wayland system on Arch Linux. This is from source and installed into /usr/local. May break your system. You have been warned. (by elethiomel@gmail.com)

First install a base Arch Linux install with base and base-devel. Do not install xorg or any of its libraries

Wayland

$ pacman -S libffi
$ git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland
$ cd wayland
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local
$ make
$ make install

DRM and Mesa

$ git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/drm
$ cd drm
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local
$ make
$ make install

$ git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa
$ cd mesa
$ CFLAGS=-DMESA_EGL_NO_X11_HEADERS ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local --enable-gles2 --disable-gallium-egl --with-egl-platforms=wayland,drm --enable-gbm --enable-shared-glapi --with-gallium-drivers=r300,r600,swrast,nouveau --disable-glx --disable-xlib
$ make
$ make install

xorg-macros

$ git clone http://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/util/macros.git
$ cd macros/
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local/
$ make
$ make install

libxkbcommon

$ git clone git://people.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libxkbcommon.git
$ cd libxkbcommon/
$ export ACLOCAL_PATH=/usr/local/share/aclocal/
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local/ --with-xkb-config-root=/usr/local/share/X11/xkb
$ make
$ make install

pixman

$ git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/pixman
$ cd pixman/
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local/
$ make
$ make install
 

cairo

Note - no glx/gl or xcb - EGL only.

$ pacman -S libpng
$ git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/cairo
$ cd cairo
$ CFLAGS=-DMESA_EGL_NO_X11_HEADERS ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local/  --disable-xcb  --enable-glesv2 
$ make
$ make install

xkb files

Either

a) Copy from an existing system a set of xkb layouts

$ scp -r /usr/share/X11/xkb to /usr/local/share/X11/

or

b) build xkeyboard-config from git with --prefix=/usr/local and --disable-runtime-deps

weston

$ git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston
$ cd weston/
$ CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include/libdrm/ -DMESA_EGL_NO_X11_HEADERS" ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local/ --with-cairo-glesv2 --disable-xwayland --disable-x11-compositor --disable- xwayland-test
$ make
$ make install

See also

• Cursor Themes

External links

• Arch Linux forum discussion
• Wayland documentation online