Wayland Is Now Available In Ubuntu 11.04

Canonical's Bryce Harrington has just announced he has uploaded a snapshot of the Wayland Display Server to the Universe repository for Ubuntu 11.04, a.k.a. the upcoming "Natty Narwhal" Linux release.

Though before getting too excited, this of course is just a snapshot for experimenting and is not installed by default nor is it really usable for anything outside of experiments. It will not be until Ubuntu 11.10 or later where Wayland will be used with Ubuntu's Unity desktop in supported hardware/software configurations.

With this Wayland snapshot found in the Ubuntu Natty repository, it's also months out of date. In order to have Wayland work with Natty's Mesa 7.10 stack, which lacks some of the recent EGL/OpenGL changes in Mesa 7.11-devel (Git master) that are needed by the latest Wayland code, an older Wayland snapshot was pulled. Bryce hopes to pull in a newer snapshot of Wayland that is compatible with Mesa 7.10, but still that snapshot is expected to be from January and thus still out-of-date. More bleeding edge packages are also expected to be uploaded to the xorg-edgers repository.

This Ubuntu Wayland package should work with the open-source Intel, ATI/AMD, and NVIDIA (Nouveau) drivers.

As said by Bryce on Ubuntu-X, "I don't imagine this to be of any use to end users. The purpose of this packaging work is foundational; to establish a starting point for packaging and lay the first few bricks of what will probably be a big house. My hope is that the availability of this package makes it that much easier for toolkit and app developers to experiment with Wayland on Ubuntu and start laying their next layer of bricks."

Bryce also wrote a slightly different message to the Wayland mailing list.