Trying Out Wayland With Rebecca Black

For those that may have extra time this weekend and have been meaning to try out the experimental Wayland Display Server, one of the easiest ways to try out this eventual X.Org Server replacement is by using a Wayland LiveCD that's dubbed Rebecca Black. Besides including a recent snapshot of Wayland, it also integrates the support for various tool-kits and other applications.

RebeccaBlackOS is the oddly-named Linux distribution that is focused on providing an "out of the box" Wayland experience for demos or just experimenting with this next-generation Linux desktop code. Along with pulling in the Wayland/Weston code and its dependencies, it also ships with versions of Qt, GTK, and EFL (Enlightenment) for using these tool-kits under Wayland. This distribution has been around for a few months, but isn't widely known yet is more Wayland-friendly than say Ubuntu 12.04 due to incorporating the Wayland back-end support for the various tool-kits. There are also plans for integrating XWayland support into the OS, but with the latest release from February that's not yet available.

This Linux distribution is maintained by "nerdopolis", a Phoronix reader, and previously had published a range of Wayland videos to demonstrate some features of the reference Wayland compositor.

This is inspired by Linux distributions of the same theme (Hannah Montana Linux, and Justin Beiber Linux) that have appeared in the Linux community, only this is Rebecca Black Linux.

The buildscripts in the SVN is availible for you to modify and build your own version of this project. (And to prove that every file on the OS image disks are under an OSI complient or creative commons license)

Oh yeah, it's also meant to be the first Wayland Live CD, and soon it will try to use Wayland instead of using X.

It's also in ALPHA so be careful!

This distribution is 3RD PARTY fan made. Yes. I am a fan of Rebecca Black.

The new ISO is released. It supports Wayland EFL, in addition to the GTK, and QT toolkits that where on the old one, and has many Wayland related fixes, and sort of works on VirtualBox, and has the experimental direct startup to Wayland.

Find out more or download it from SourceForge.