X.Org Applications On Wayland Are Working

For those curious about the support for running X11/X.Org applications on Wayland, the support has come along quite nicely and is basically ready to begin showing off.

Tiago Vignatti, the former Nokia developer and now Intel Open-Source Technology Center developer contributing to Wayland, has blogged today about X on Wayland. "A rather cool feature on Weston compositor is xwayland, to support X11 native applications on Wayland. It’s a quite important feature because gives the compatibility with the “old” windowing system, so say you have an application written on Motif/Xt or even something more “fancy” like a Web browser all tied with GTK2 and whatever dependency, then you better not bother yourself re-writing it to native Wayland or porting to a modern toolkit — it should just work seamlessly on it. Hence, X on Wayland fits pretty well with our overall transition plan."

In Tiago's aforelinked blog post, he covers the architecture for X programs on the Wayland Display Server with the Weston compositor, the XWayland module, the Weston X window manager, and other components that make running X applications on Wayland a reality. It's a technical article and well worth reading for those interested in Wayland.

For those not interested in the technical details of the X Wayland implementation but just want to see the initial implementation working, embedded below is a short video presentation.