Mir
Getting and Using Mir

Getting Mir examples

These instructions assume that you’re using Ubuntu 17.10 later. For earlier releases of Ubuntu or other distributions see Getting Involved in Mir.

You can install the Mir examples along with the Mir graphics drivers as follows:

$ sudo apt install mir-demos qterminal
$ sudo apt install mir-graphics-drivers-desktop qtubuntu-desktop

Using Mir examples

For convenient testing there's a "miral-app" script that wraps the commands used to start a server and then launches a terminal (as the current user):

$ miral-app

To run independently of X11 you need to grant access to the graphics hardware (by running as root) and specify a VT to run in. There's a "miral-desktop" script that wraps to start the server (as root) and then launch a terminal (as the current user):

$ miral-desktop

For more options see Options when running the Mir example shell below.

Running applications on Mir

If you use the command-line launched by miral-app or miral-desktop native Mir applications (which include native Mir clients and those that use SDL or the GTK+, Qt toolkits) can be started as usual:

$ mir_demo_client_egltriangle
$ gedit
$ sudo apt install kate neverball 
$ kate
$ neverball

From outside the MirAL session GTK+, Qt and SDL applications can still be run using the miral-run script:

$ miral-run gedit
$ miral-run 7kaa

Running for X11 applications

If you want to run X11 applications that do not have native Mir support in the toolkit they use then the answer is Xmir: an X11 server that runs on Mir. First you need Xmir installed:

$ sudo apt install xmir

Then once you have started a miral shell (as above) you can use miral-xrun to run applications under Xmir:

$ miral-xrun firefox

This automatically starts a Xmir X11 server on a new $DISPLAY for the application to use. You can use miral-xrun both from a command-line outside the miral-shell or, for example, from the terminal running in the shell.

Options when running the Mir example shell

Script Options

Both the "miral-app" and "miral-desktop" scripts provide options for using an alternative example shell (miral-kiosk) and an alternative to gnome-terminal.

-kiosk               use miral-kiosk instead of miral-shell
-launcher <launcher> use <launcher> instead of qterminal

In addition miral-desktop has the option to set the VT that is used:

-vt       <termid>   set the virtual terminal [4]

There are some additional options (listed with "-h") but those are the important ones.

miral-shell Options

The scripts can also be used to pass options to Mir: they pass everything on the command-line following the first thing they don't understand. These can be listed by miral-shell --help. Most of these options are inherited from Mir, but the following MirAL specific are likely to be of interest:

--window-management-trace           log trace message

Probably the main use for MirAL is to test window-management (either of a toolkit or of a server) and this logs all calls to and from the window management policy. This option is supported directly in the MirAL library and works for any MirAL based shell - even one you write yourself.

--keymap arg (=us)                  keymap <layout>[+<variant>[+<options>]]
                                    , e,g, "gb" or "cz+qwerty" or 
                                    "de++compose:caps"

For those of us not in the USA this is very useful. Both the -shell and -kiosk examples support this option.

--window-manager arg (=floating)   window management strategy 
                                   [{floating|tiling|system-compositor}]

Is only supported by miral-shell and its main use is to allow an alternative "tiling" window manager to be selected.


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Generated on Mon Oct 30 19:44:55 UTC 2017