A Linux LiveCD To Play With Wayland/Weston

Posted by Michael Larabel on August 10, 2012

If you're sad about Ubuntu delaying their Wayland System Compositor and want to take Wayland/Weston for a spin, there's another alternative for playing with this next-generation Linux desktop technology.

For a Wayland-based LiveCD that is designed for showing off Wayland/Weston and related technologies, there is the oddly-named RebeccaBlack OS. The developer of this Linux OS, who says that distribution is named in honor of his favorite celebrity (Rebecca Black), released a new spin this week.

The new LiveCD updates Wayland, XWayland, and other components. "I feel this version might actually somewhat usable."

This Wayland LiveCD also ships with the Wayland versions of Qt, SDL, GTK, and EFL. Clutter though is missing since this tool-kit has yet to be ported to the Wayland 0.95 protocol. The updated RebeccaBlack OS also adds a Xorg-backed Wayland implementation that calls Weston with the X11 back-end full-screen on top of an X.Org Server for hardware/drivers that don't support Wayland at this time.

RebeccaBlack OS is based upon the Ubuntu 12.10 Linux packages.

This distribution can be downloaded from SourceForge.net.

Update: Here's a Phoronix preview of this latest Wayland/Weston implementation, including screenshots of this new RebeccaBlack OS release.

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