Xubuntu, the Xfce-based flavor of Xubuntu, is presently evaluating the use of Canonical's Mir display server via the XMir X11 transition layer. For helping in the process and testing, the Ubuntu derivative has made public some Xubuntu XMir images.
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1,651 Ubuntu open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
One of the feature limitations of using the Mir Display Server up to this point has been when using multiple monitors (or say a laptop connected to a projector) the only display configuration possibility is using a cloned mode whereby the screens are the same. Canonical's Mir developers have begun working on improved multi-monitor handling.
It was one week ago that Canonical launched the Ubuntu Edge crowd-funding effort in hopes of raising 32 million dollars in the period of one month to develop a high-end Ubuntu-powered smart-phone.
While Ubuntu itself no longer does alpha releases, several of its derivatives are doing their "Saucy Salamander" Alpha 2 releases today.
The Ubuntu SDK that serves as a toolkit for Ubuntu's "converged platform" of mobile and desktop as one, has now reached beta form.
It seems Canonical is making it a habit of tagging new versions of the Mir Display Server on a weekly basis. Mir 0.0.8 is out this week with a handful of changes over v0.0.7.
As anticipated, Canonical announced today their Ubuntu Edge smart-phone. However, details are scarce and they don't even have the hardware specifications ironed out but are first trying to raise financing via crowd-funding.
On the Ubuntu web-site has been a teaser about "the line where two surfaces meet" and a 4-day countdown (ending 22 July). There's been wild speculation about this countdown and now it appears it will be an announcement of Ubuntu Edge, the first Ubuntu-powered smartphone.
Canonical is back to trying to get upstream Mesa/Gallium3D to support their Mir Display Server. In their current form, the support comes across 15 patches for bringing up the Mir EGL platform.
Canonical's Christopher Halse Rogers wrote a blog post over the weekend to try to clear up the XMir performance situation and say that Canonical engineers are working on improving the performance, as users begin to discover there's a performance hit in using XMir.
Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has been running the Mir Display Server for the past two weeks. After doing so, he's very happy with the Mir experience in Ubuntu 13.10 at this stage in its development and already feels that it's smoother than with X. He's blogged about his experience of running Mir on Ubuntu Linux.
For those living on the bleeding edge Ubuntu 13.10 developments, Mir 0.0.6 has been tagged.
The Ubuntu Touch image model has been flipped around so that Android is no longer on the bottom side and that Ubuntu is going for a different position.
While Ubuntu Linux no longer participates in alpha releases, other members of the Ubuntu family did their first 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" alpha releases today. Coming out today in 13.10 Alpha 1 form is Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, and Ubuntu Kylin.
More Mir news today besides the surprise announcement that Canonical is now planning to use the Mir Display Server by default in Ubuntu 13.10, there's some other interesting news involving Mir benchmarking, the Mir 0.0.5 release, and Kubuntu avoiding Mir/XMir and reaffirming their commitment to X.Org and Wayland.
Originally Canonical was planning to ship their Mir Display Server by default in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on the desktop and in Ubuntu 13.10 still be using an X.Org Server outside of mobile devices. However, it's been announced today that with Ubuntu 13.10 they will now be using Mir by default.
Canonical is hiring more engineers to work on their Mir Display Server and Unity desktop interface.
For those curious about the Mir Display Server development but aren't actively following its Bazaar development repository, the development continues to be dominated by Canonical and here's some numbers looking at the current development statistics surrounding Mir.
With all of the controversy surrounding the Mir Display Server for Ubuntu Linux on non-Unity desktops, a Canonical engineer sought to find out what Linux desktops would work atop Mir if using the XMir X.Org Server compatibility layer.
For those wishing to play with the next-generation Unity 8 interface atop the Mir Display Server while running Ubuntu Touch, a Personal Package Archive (PPA) is now available. There's also been other Mir and Unity 8 progress made this week.
Taking a break from blogging about UEFI and Secure Boot, Linux kernel developer Matthew Garrett is now writing about how Canonical's choice of license for their Mir Display Server is a bit scary. It's not the GPLv3 license alone that's raising eyebrows, but the GPLv3 combined with the Ubuntu Contributor's License Agreement that is unfortunate in the mobile space.
Canonical has announced today the Carrier Advisory Group for Ubuntu Touch/Phone.
For those looking for the latest drama in the Ubuntu Linux land, the fighting over whether KDE and GNOME should support the Mir Display Server to complement the in-development Wayland support continues to be hotly discussed.
With Canonical's planned adoption of their in-house Mir Display Server over the next year rather than using an X.Org Server or Wayland, derivatives such as KDE-based Kubuntu continue to fear the change and what exactly the options will be.
Ubuntu developers are still likely to be switching from Mozilla Firefox as the Linux distribution's default web-browser to now using Google's open-source Chromium platform.
This past week Canonical developers made a little more progress on their Mir Display Server stack and the next-generation Unity desktop interface.
For those that haven't yet tried out the Ubuntu Phone first hand by loading it onto one of the supported devices, here's a video of the latest Ubuntu Phone version on the Galaxy Nexus smart-phone.
Here's an update on the Mir display server changes and the adjoining next-generation Unity 8 user-interface that were made to end out May.
Canonical's Kevin Gunn shared a status update for the advancements made by their team this week on the Mir Display Server and next-generation Unity 8 interface.
Yesterday evening I mentioned Ubuntu Linux developers would be discussing replacing Mozilla Firefox with Google Chromium as the default web-browser in Ubuntu 13.10. After the discussion today, it looks like this may very well happen.
As mentioned already this morning, the plan with Ubuntu 13.10 is to have an experimental Unity 8 desktop powered by Mir for those wishing to toy around with Canonical's next-generation work. The default, however, will be Unity 7 in an X.Org environment. Even so, the Unity 7 desktop along with the Compiz window manager will receive some refinements for the next Ubuntu release.
For those Linux enthusiasts wishing to toy with the Mir Display Server and Canonical's next-generation Unity 8 interface, they will be made optionally available for desktop users with the Ubuntu 13.10 release due out in October.
Linux developers are considering this week replacing Mozilla Firefox with Chromium, Google's open-source version of their Chrome web-browser, for the Ubuntu 13.10 release.
Arch Linux replaced MySQL with MariaDB, openSUSE gutted MySQL, Fedora replaced MySQL, and now Ubuntu Linux is looking to continue the trend.
While NVIDIA Optimus and other multi-GPU/hybrid laptop graphics systems have been available for years, in the Linux world support for these capabilities is still in the early stages.
Yesterday during the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit to begin working out Ubuntu 13.10 plans were more discussions surrounding the distribution's proposed new packaging system.
Martin Gräßlin, the maintainer of KDE's KWin window manager, has been vocal against Canonical's Mir Display Server from the beginning. He's now written another blog post on the matter in which he makes it rather clear there is little hope of seeing KDE running on the Ubuntu Wayland-competitor.
A beta release of the Ubuntu SDK is currently slated for availability in July. Other plans for the Ubuntu SDK were also expressed today during this week's virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit.
Ubuntu Brainstorm served as a way for the Ubuntu community to nominate new ideas for the Linux operating system, comment on these ideas, and vote on the ideas should you find them interesting and worthwhile. However, now it looks like Ubuntu Brainstorm is going to be eliminated.
Canonical's Kevin Gunn has issued a status update on new achievements for the Mir Display Server as well as for the next-generation "Unity 8" user-interface.
On the same day as sharing their plans for Ubuntu's own package format and installer, Rick Spencer of Canonical has laid out plans for the Ubuntu Phone to be "usable as our daily phones" by month's end.
While Ubuntu already has its own software store, Canonical developers are now working on their own application package installer and package format.
The Ubuntu 13.10 release, a.k.a. the Saucy Salamander, now has an official release date.
While there isn't yet a release yet of Ubuntu in the Linux x32 ABI flavor, some packages now found in Ubuntu 13.04 make it easier to setup this binary interface that brings some 64-bit advantages to the 32-bit world.
Mark Shuttleworth has revealed the codename for Ubuntu 13.10.
Canonical has officially announced the release of Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" this morning.
The Linux kernel zRAM module allows for creating RAM-based compressed block devices and for common situations can reduce or eliminate paging on disk. The zRAM feature can be particularly beneficial for systems with limited amounts of system memory. It's quite easy to setup zRAM on Ubuntu Linux, so in this article are some before and after benchmarks.
Canonical has released new "Raring-based" Ubuntu Touch images for the Google Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and Galaxy Nexus devices.
While there was the video of Unity Next running on Mir with a Google Nexus 4 hand-held, in terms of the overall feature completeness of the Mir Display Server, there is still much work ahead. Only on Friday did Mir even gain support for switching to virtual terminals.
Canonical has announced the final beta for the Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" products.
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