Clutter's Latest Release Gains Wayland Back-End

The Wayland Display Server continues moving forward and is nearing the point of usability by enthusiasts and those interested in easily trying out this display server that leverages the latest and greatest Linux graphics technologies.

Wayland can now be built and run from mainline components (as in no longer pulling the personal branches of developers), Qt is beginning to work, and GTK+ is already working in some areas and GTK+3 should be in good shape for Wayland. What do we have to report on Wayland now? The Clutter tool-kit has now picked up its Wayland back-end.

Emmanuele Bassi of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center (the same group where Kristian Høgsberg - the creator of Wayland - works at Intel on their driver stack, along with many other Linux developers) has announced the Clutter 1.5.4 development release. The first change mentioned for the Clutter 1.5.4 release is "Add a backend for Wayland." In other words, you can now use Clutter on the Wayland Display Server.

For those that missed it when we reported it back in September, Intel is looking to deploy Wayland on MeeGo Touch. There was also another Wayland demonstration at XDS Toulouse.

Other changes in Clutter 1.5.4 according to the release announcement is a dependence on Cairo 1.10+, implementing new functions, plugging memory leaks, fixes to the Mac OS X back-end, build fixes, and documentation fixes.

The Clutter 1.5.x development series is leading up to the Clutter 1.6 stable release, which should be released around the time of GNOME 3.0 in March.