[ubuntu-x] Wayland in Natty

[Bryce Harrington]

Hi all,

I'd like to announce that wayland is available in Ubuntu Universe.
You can install via Software Center (search for 'wayland') or from
the command line:

 $ sudo apt-get install wayland
 $ wstart


For the gratuitously curious, here's some boring technical bits:

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.

Wayland is a bit of a moving target in terms of its dependencies.
The latest version of Wayland needs a newer version of mesa than we're
going to ship in Natty.  However this old snapshot has all its
dependencies met.  It looks like I can update to a newer snapshot, which
I will try doing as time (and feature freeze limitations) permit.

For those wanting much more bleeding edge packages of Wayland, I think
we'll be including it in xorg-edgers too, if we can recruit someone to
help do updates and keep an eye on it.

While this installs as a single package, this is actually a combination
of three distinct parts.  First is the protocol and client/server
libraries... this is "Wayland" proper.  Second is an example
prototype compositor, which is what is what is doing the rendering and
managing clients but not something that would actually ship in production
(you'd instead enable the Wayland protocol in Compiz/Unity, kwin,
mutter, or similar).  Third is a collection of demo programs which are
Wayland enabled (a terminal program, gears, etc.)  We'll probably split
these up and package them differently in the future.

I don't imagine this to be of any use to end users.  The purpose of this
packaging work is foundational; to establish a starting point for
packaging and lay the first few bricks of what will probably be a big
house.  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 and start laying their next layer of bricks.

Bryce