I heard that 13.10 used a mix of Mir and X.Org. How about 14.04? Will it also be using both or just Mir. If its just Mir then how do we get official (not proprietary) drivers to work (by AMD)
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1This is a question for discourse.ubuntu.com, not for AU!– miniMar 25, 2014 at 4:22
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1@onrea Part--I think most--of this question seems concrete and objectively answerable. I've tried to answer it appropriately.– Eliah KaganMar 25, 2014 at 5:29
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1In my opinion, this question is nowhere close to being a bug report or problem with the development version of Ubuntu. (It will also remain relevant when 14.04 is released... since people will still want to know if Mir has been adopted yet and whether or not traditional commercial drivers for their video cards will work, when contemplating adopting 14.04.)– Eliah KaganMar 28, 2014 at 2:13
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@EliahKagan but it's speculation. We are not a news site, nor a gossip one. If anyone wants to know what will bring 14.04 either read the news/blogs or wait until release. And once 14.04 gets released, this question becomes irrelevant.– BraiamMar 28, 2014 at 3:57
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@Braiam The question what software is in 14.04 does not become irrelevant once 14.04 is released! (Also, the question of what software is running in default 14.04 installations now isn't one of speculation.)– Eliah KaganMar 28, 2014 at 17:04
1 Answer
X.org continues to be packaged for 14.04 Trusty Tahr, as evidenced by the xorg
source package's Launchpad page (showing package version 1:7.7+1ubuntu8 in Trusty) and the xserver-xorg
binary package's Ubuntu Packages database page. The file list shows it's not just a transitional package, but actually provides software--in particular, the /usr/bin/X
executable.
Also, I'm currently running Trusty on a VMware virtual machine and when I log in to a Unity desktop, /usr/bin/X
is running:
ek@Gnar:~$ ps ax | grep `pgrep Xorg` | head -1
2494 tty7 Ss+ 0:04 /usr/bin/X -core :0 -seat seat0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch
And this executable is provided by the xserver-xorg
binary package, on my system:
ek@Gnar:~$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/X
xserver-xorg: /usr/bin/X
(To reproduce this, one may perform those steps or one may choose to look for /usr/bin/Xorg
from xserver-xorg-core
instead.)
And for additional assurance that X.org is still present in Ubuntu 14.04 and remains the default display server:
As cited in Wikipedia, it was at one time intended that Mir fully replace X.org in 14.04, but this was postponed and is expected for Ubuntu 16.04 instead. See also this article summarizing the history.
Although you can run Mir with a preview version of Unity 8 in 14.04, this version of Unity is provided by a separate package (
unity8-desktop-session-mir
) from the regularunity
package. The Unity (major) version in 14.04 remains 7. Here's theunity
source package page and theunity
binary package page.Or if you prefer to check from a 14.04 system, running
apt-cache policy unity
yields:unity: Installed: 7.1.2+14.04.20140321-0ubuntu1 Candidate: 7.1.2+14.04.20140321-0ubuntu1 Version table: *** 7.1.2+14.04.20140321-0ubuntu1 0 500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
Unity 7 uses X.org on Ubuntu.
As of this writing, 14.04 has entered its final beta freeze. At this point, improvement of 14.04 consists mainly of fixing bugs. Huge new features are extremely unlikely to be added.
As may be part of your motivation for asking this question, it's true there have been some concerns about driver support for Mir, with at least one major video vendor (Intel) having said they don't plan to support it. But X.org and Mir aren't the only display servers. In particular, it appears the Kubuntu project (the Ubuntu flavor with KDE as the default desktop environment) will be trying to adopt Wayland. Wayland already has significant support in commercial video drivers.
Rather than speculate wildly about what might happen, I want to limit the focus of this answer to what has happened, been developed, and been announced. (More subjective or speculative answers, or forum-like discussion, would be more appropriate on Discuss. Credit to onrea for suggesting that site.) But you may find useful information and news in some of the citations within this section of the Wikipedia article on Mir.
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2The conclusion of the OMGUbuntu editor, that Mir will be the default for 16.04 seems to me a bit far fetched. He is citing "By 16.04 it’ll be the default display server…That’s the kind of timeline we’re looking at." and making it sound like it will not happen earlier in non-LTS releases, while this is obvious for LTS releases, it is not set in stone. I personally wouldn't link to this poorly written (quote is altered), speculative and non-newsworthy story, but directly to the video. Mar 25, 2014 at 9:16