Mir
Using Mir on a PC

Before you begin

Make sure your hardware is supported. That means you're using a Mesa driver, of which intel, radeon, and nouveau families are supported. If you're logged in to X then run this command to verify an appropriate DRI driver is active:

sudo pmap `pidof X` | grep dri.so

or

lsmod | grep drm

Before you can use Mir you need to ensure you have the proper custom Mesa build installed. If you are running Ubuntu 13.10 or later (see Installing pre-built packages on a PC), you should be good to go.

If you built Mir from source code (see Building the source for a PC), you need to ensure you are using the proper Mesa at runtime. You can do that by installing the Mesa packages from Ubuntu 13.10 (or later) or by building the custom Mesa yourself and ensuring it can be found by Mir, e.g., by using LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Running Mir natively

To run Mir natively on a PC/desktop/laptop, log in to VT1 (Ctrl+Alt+F1) after you are already logged in to X. If you do so before then you will not be assigned adequate credentials to access the graphics hardware and will get strange errors.

VT switching away from Mir will only work if Mir is run as root. In this case we need to change the permissions to the Mir socket so that clients can connect:

$ sudo mir_demo_server
<Ctrl+Alt+F2> - log in to VT 2
$ sudo chmod a+rw /tmp/mir_socket
$ some-mir-client -m /tmp/mir_socket
<Ctrl+Alt+F1> - switch back to Mir. Watch your friends be amazed!

In case you accidentally killed your X login and ended up with a failsafe screen, you might find on subsequent reboots you can't log in to X at all any more (it instantly and silently takes you back to the login screen). The fix for this is to log in to a VT and:

$ rm .Xauthority
$ sudo restart lightdm

Getting some example client applications

You can get some example programs by installing the mir-demos package:

$ sudo apt-get install mir-demos

If you are building from source you can find client applications in the bin/ subdirectory of the build directory.


Copyright © 2012-2015 Canonical Ltd.
Generated on Thu Oct 8 16:20:16 UTC 2015