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X GNOME GUI Graphics Ubuntu

Xfce, LXDE, GNOME3 Desktops Running On Ubuntu Mir Via XMir 162

An anonymous reader writes "Through the use of XMir, a translation layer for running legacy X11 applications atop Ubuntu's forthcoming Mir display server, the GNOME Shell, Xfce, and LXDE desktops now run on this X.Org Server alternative. With XMir, the traditional window managers are still running while Mir treats these desktops as a single window."
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Xfce, LXDE, GNOME3 Desktops Running On Ubuntu Mir Via XMir

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  • by davydagger ( 2566757 ) on Monday June 24, 2013 @07:03PM (#44097087)
    what about mirWayland, or waylandMir?
    • by TsuruchiBrian ( 2731979 ) on Monday June 24, 2013 @07:17PM (#44097161)
      or XMirWayland or in case I want to run XMir in Wayland.
      • Then there is the port of the KDE / Almquist shell integration - Kashmir

        [groan]

      • by jatoo ( 2393402 )

        But should it run in user land, kernel land or wayland?

      • But what about wayland on X (sounds possible given the architecture) or mir for cross compatibility,

        The you can have XmirXwalylandXXmirXwaylandmirwaylandXmirXwaylandwaylandmirX

        Pro tip: don't forget to have an actual graphics device in there somewhere.

    • Won't happen because very few applications will target Mir or Wayland directly. They will most likely use GTK+, Qt, SDL etc. So once either of those widgetslibraries supports both Mir and Wayland there is no need to emulate Mir on Wayland and vice verse. XMir and XWayland is needed though since there is still a lot of X11-only applications out there.
  • Multiple Displays? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LifesABeach ( 234436 ) on Monday June 24, 2013 @07:11PM (#44097131) Homepage
    Finally USB Display functioning?
    • by Blaskowicz ( 634489 ) on Monday June 24, 2013 @07:22PM (#44097181)

      Each running separate X sessions and unable to move a window from one display to another? That is what I got the day I tried a second graphics card in my PC to connect a second monitor.
      The OS was an Ubuntu version released long after Windows 7 and it still expected me to write some xinerama xorg.conf bullshit, which would have probably ended with maximized windows covering both displays and modal windows appearing right in the middle, on both sides of the physical divide. But I think I would have had to give up running the nvidia driver. LOL!

      Sad thing is Windows 98 SE happily ran multiple monitors on different graphics cards (different card, different driver, different vendor).

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        > Sad thing is Windows 98 SE happily

        Probably not. You may not even be old enough to have even touched it yourself ever.

        Mixing multiple vendors for different displays isn't even a recommended Windows setup now.

        • by Rob_Bryerton ( 606093 ) on Monday June 24, 2013 @08:19PM (#44097439) Homepage
          Looking at his UID, his account was registered around 1999-2000'ish... of course he could've inherited it from his dad!

          I will now get off of your lawn ;)
        • by Anonymous Coward

          Recommended no...maybe not. Supported. Yes.

          Some of us have run multiple monitor and multiple graphics card setups since Win98 and NT 4 on 440BX reference boards and the shit just worked. Despite my love for FOSS let's be intellectually honest here. It took X a extra decade worth of development time to have decent multi-mon support and it had nothing to do with shitty vendor drivers. You couldn't run two Monochrome/VGA or SVGA X servers in Parallel and do window sharing.

          • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
            MY Voodoo2 ran really nice on my 440BX with a P3-700@933
        • It was the way things were done in win9x. Moving to Win2k was a slap in the face when this was no longer supported

          http://support.microsoft.com/kb/182708 [microsoft.com]

          "The video adapters that are installed in your computer do not have to be identical. Each video adapter and monitor combination is separately enumerated by Windows; you can configure each combination to use different screen resolutions and color depths. For example, you can set the primary adapter to 1024 X 768 pixels with 256 colors and the secondary ad
      • by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 24, 2013 @08:44PM (#44097539)

        Been using X since the 80s, and mutil monitors on X since somewhere in the late 90s, both with the displays all on the same box, and later, with some of the displays running on separate computers using xdmx.

        Using Xorg.conf for xinerama config, while maybe not ideal for grandma, wasn't terrible, and you only did it once. But, for folks like you, there is now xrandr which you can setup via xorg.conf, use your WMs hooks into it to do it all gui-ish, or just run shell commands to setup your multi-monitor layout (since it would be trivial to write [hell you could do it in a short shell script], there is probably a daemon available that will auto add a monitor when plugged in and remove it when unplugged, but I am not familiar with it if it exists).

        As for not being able to move a window between monitors, you are doing it wrong. Depending upon your window manager, and how *you* set things up, you can have independent displays (uncommon, but apparently how you set things up), one big shared desktop like windows and mac (gnome, kde, etc.), or, something smarter, a kind of hybrid between the two where things act like a unified desktop when you want them to, but you can switch virtual desktops independently per each physical display-- which is *very* nice (e17).

        You can drag windows between displays even when the displays are on different boxes (xdmx). Unfortunately xdmx only works with xinerama, and newer graphics cards only work with xrandr, so in a crappy transition period now for this. But, if you ever want to setup a video wall with 100 monitors acting as one unified display, xdmx is probably the only game in town.

          If you want to use MS Windows, nobody is stopping you, but please don't spread FUD.

        • I believe that Xrandr is a new event aletring windows that the screen configuration has changed (and a mechanism to query available changes and select them). Xinerama is the mechanism for dealing with multiple physical screens, their locations, gaps between them etc.

          The two work well together and I believe that they are designed to work together.

        • Waay too easy. (Score:4, Informative)

          by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday June 25, 2013 @07:27AM (#44099375)

          Using Xorg.conf for xinerama config, while maybe not ideal for grandma, wasn't terrible, and you only did it once. But, for folks like you, there is now xrandr which you can setup via xorg.conf, use your WMs hooks into it to do it all gui-ish, or just run shell commands to setup your multi-monitor layout (since it would be trivial to write [hell you could do it in a short shell script], there is probably a daemon available that will auto add a monitor when plugged in and remove it when unplugged, but I am not familiar with it if it exists).

          Unfortunately xdmx only works with xinerama, and newer graphics cards only work with xrandr, so in a crappy transition period now for this. But, if you ever want to setup a video wall with 100 monitors acting as one unified display, xdmx is probably the only game in town.

          You had me at "Just right click and click output to and select multi-monitor". Phew that was easy.

          Except you didn't say that. What you propose is something that Linux was known for in the 90s, really shit complicated and borderline unusable multi-monitor support.

          • Did you miss the "use your WMs hooks into it to do it all gui-ish"?
            • No. This is Linux. Often the command line is easier than the disaster which is most gui-ish implementations, OR the gui-ish implementation is so dumbed down that the result breaks and you need to drop in the command line anyway.

              • No. This is Linux. Often the command line is easier than the disaster which is most gui-ish implementations, OR the gui-ish implementation is so dumbed down that the result breaks and you need to drop in the command line anyway.

                But... it's not. The GUIs for this work quite well. You can keep trying to prop this strawman up, but he's still made of straw.

                • Ok so what popular out of the box user friendly distro supports this without creative tweaking? Ubuntu? Mint? Nope, and they account for the lions share of user friendly distros. Just google Ubuntu multimonitor and see the clusterfuck of tweaks that need to be done to fix certain nuances of the horrendous Linux multimonitor support. Just the top two results, one ends up going back to a custom xorg.conf, the other uses a bloody hex editor to fix flash fullscreening to wrong window issues. Oh hell just search

                  • Ok so what popular out of the box user friendly distro supports this without creative tweaking? Ubuntu?

                    Yep. It's worked flawlessly for me many times.

      • I can relate to this.

        Granted, I have seen it work just fine with different cards.

        But with nvidia, I have two different cards and, yep, can't move a window from one screen to another.

        debian linux on x86_64

      • For the record, I was running a geforce 8400GS and Radeon 7000 PCI on linux mint 13 Mate (i.e. Ubuntu 12.04 with Gnome 2's fork). The 8400GS could only do one VGA output for some reason.
        Ten years ago I got a Voodoo5 5500, S3 Virge DX and S3 Virge running together on 98SE (just to try it out, then I used dual display a bit). Even videos would display on two screens at once when windows media player 6.0's overlapped the border, which I found was unexpected and impressive.

        I can get that it was probably nvidia'

      • I mean, the Linux community has been bitching about this too. It sounds like an Nvidia Optimus laptop. The fact of the matter is that Nvidia is the villian in this story, not Linux. Search around a bit (hint: maybe Linus has a thing or two to say).

      • I had this experience too. I managed to get it running with a single X session, but XRandR only supports one "screen" (in X11 terms) per GPU, which means that you can drag windows between monitors on the same GPU, but the monitors on the other GPU are separate and you can't drag windows over to them. (Here's a corroborating mailing list post [gmane.org].) Window dragging works with Xinerama (windows maximized properly etc), but Xinerama doesn't work with 2D hardware acceleration, so you lose that.

        Even with Xinerama, I

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I mean that in the nicest way. X is obviously on the way out (long term), and something has to replace it. XWayland looks promising since it got an early lead, but I appreciate the fact that Ubuntu has made dealing with video drivers easy, and I imagine working with Valve has given them some insight to what they think is needed. I disagree with some of Canonicals positions in other areas (systemd), but I'm patient enough to wait and see a victor emerge eventually. And hopefully we can avoid a bigger fiasco

    • X11 is a little long in tooth, X12 will most likely be the next windows system.

      • Is there going to be an X12? Some of the main X11 devs are working on Wayland. Have any thought about doing an X12?
        • Is there going to be an X12? Some of the main X11 devs are working on Wayland. Have any thought about doing an X12?

          X12 just was a tentative name for some imaginary future replacement. Even though there were some X12 ideas docs in the past, the reality is that Wayland the the de facto X12.

    • I appreciate the fact that Ubuntu has made dealing with video drivers easy, and I imagine working with Valve has given them some insight to what they think is needed.

      Mandriva added easy driver installation to Linux way before Ubuntu's Jockey even existed.
      Canonical also does not develop drivers, therefore I don't get how you think it matters what Canonoical may know what's needed. So far the FOSS drivers were developed by AMD (radeon), Intel, Google (Gallium-based Intel drivers), SUSE (radeonhd), and Red Hat (nouveau, radeon, and more). Canonical never ever even touched GPU driver code.

  • So basically we have an outdated interface and replace it with some added complexity, then another layer which gives us the same outdated interface.
  • Soon these Desktops will need wayland. so they need to run wayland on Xmir to run Xfce. Have a lot of fun...

    • Soon these Desktops will need wayland. so they need to run wayland on Xmir to run Xfce. Have a lot of fun...

      I don't see a real problem with just ending Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc.
      Despite PR talk, Canonical is not interested in them. If Canonical was, Mir would not exist and Wayland would be used as originally planned.
      There are many fine Linux distributions that ship Xfce etc.

  • I predict that Mir will last a lot longer than we all expect despite being made on a budget and falling to pieces by the end of its life. It will then fragment and what's left will end up in the south Pacific.

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