A software developer who has delivered many successful projects.
His current challenge (sponsored by Canonical): Mir.
@doniks said in Proposal: The Edge channel:
Did I miss anything?
Not really. I raise two typical developer questions:
(There are three numbers in computing 0, 1 and many.)
This sounds odd, because what you're proposing for edge is what devel has been described as (and is for a lot of projects). It would be reasonable to take the attitude people running devel were warned, and chose to accept the risk that devel is not guaranteed to be stable.
To create a new channel because you worry that some people expect something without good reason seems excessive.
However, convenience for developers is another story. Having an easy way to install experimental versions is important. Does a single channel cover this need? Would it be better to have the facility for multiple sub-channels?
(From the sidelines as I'm content to run stable and await released versions.)
@Diogo coincidentally Canonical is getting some developers together in Brussels in September. That means I (and the Mir team) will be around September 17-21 does that week work for you?
Great story!
One small clarification:
With this decision there arose a problem: the compatibility of Unity 8 with GNOME. Unity 8 runs on Mir - a computer display server, but recently Canonical adopted the Wayland compositor for its operating system, with the X Window System for the Ubuntu desktop.
I feel this conflates a number of issues. (E.g. the compositor used by GNOME3 is Mutter, which supports operation as either a X11 or Wayland compositor.)
I would suggest rewording:
"With this decision there arose a problem: the GNOME 3 desktop adopted by Canonical supports client apps using the Wayland and X11 protocols. In contrast Unity8 was based on apps using the "mirclient" API. The progress made by Canonical getting client toolkits and libraries to support "mirclient" faltered and went into reverse."
@gizmochicken said in 18.04 desktop - getting it working again:
Note that, in addition to posting results for Mir 0.32.1 RC4 (installed from ppa:mir-team/rc), I also posted results for Mir 0.32.0 (installed from the UBports repo). Hope that helps.
Just to follow up on this here: Unity8 is working for me with (or without) the Mir release 0.32.1 from ppa:mir-team/release.
However, it isn't working with the gdm greeter, just lightdm. (I've not experimented with further greeters.)
@gizmochicken said in 18.04 desktop - getting it working again:
As for posting informative log messages, I’m not sure what to look for, or even where to look. With some guidance, I’d be happy to try.
Thanks for what you done already!
As for guidance, I replied on phone while away from old fashioned computers so couldn't be more specific. I think the following will be helpful:
grep --before 25 --after 75 "mirserver: Starting" /var/log/syslog | tail -n 100
Please check the output for anything personal you don't want to share. (This will probably only capture the user name you try to sign in with but the unexpected can happen.)
I'll try to look myself later, but first need to finish other tests and then set up a suitable test environment.
--- update ---
I found one problem, which I fixed by hacking the launch script:
$ cat `which lightdm-unity8-session`
...
# {arg} systemctl --user set-environment MIR_SERVER_VT=$XDG_VTNR
After this, I see the following just before Unity8 crashes:
Jul 12 12:12:35 alan-NUC7i3DNKE unity8-session[4469]: [2018-07-12 12:12:35.775889] mirserver: Using software cursor
Jul 12 12:12:35 alan-NUC7i3DNKE unity8-session[4469]: [2018-07-12:12:12:35.776] zero sized software cursor image is invalid
Which is a Unity8 bug I think @mariogrip is aware of.
I'm not sure how either problem was avoided before. Maybe UBports made changes to Mir 0.32.0?
--- update ---
I've checked with @mariogrip - Mir 0.32.0 from the UBports repository is unaltered. I still don't understand how this ever worked.
@gizmochicken said in 18.04 desktop - getting it working again:
@alan_g: If Unity8 is installing upstream Mir 0.32, shouldn’t the Mir 0.32.1 RCs from ppa:mir-team/rc be expected to work with Unity8? Or am I missing a step?
I would expect 0.32.1 to be a "drop in" replacement for 0.32.0. (It works that way for egmde.)
We need to understand what is happening, could you leave a message on the 0.32.1 PR? Preferably with informative log messages?
Thanks
@lexswed said in 18.04 desktop - getting it working again:
Any chances to get unity8 desktop image for installation?
Once Unity8 is working well enough, that's a likely goal. But, as there are currently very few active developers, this might take a year or two.
@gizmochicken said in Reverse Convergence? View & control your phone from computer (like VNC & RDP?):
@alan_g: In a post on the Ubuntu community forums, you mentioned that you aren't planning to add Wayland remote desktop support to Mir any time soon. Although maybe not soon, do you foresee adding such a feature to Mir at any time in the foreseeable future?
I can see the value of such a feature to the Mir project: Like any open source project, if someone wants to do the work and contribute it then we would all benefit.
However, the team at Canonical are obliged to prioritise their efforts: there's more value, for example, from implementing support for logind, for X11 applications, for the xdg-shell (stable) extension, or a number of other Wayland extensions (managing decorations, panels etc.).
FWIW Mir is hardly the only Wayland compositor to focus on having "the desktop" working well before planning support for "the remote desktop".