Mir 2.4, enhancing digital signage and smart screen development

Another cycle brings another release of Mir, with new features and new innovative use cases. For those of you new to Mir, our flexible display server provides a set of libraries and Wayland compositor for building Wayland-based shells with integrated window management. It is widely used in different IoT applications, including digital signage solutions and desktops shells. And today, Canonical is launching Mir 2.4, a new version of Mir that improves Mir interfaces for graphics platforms to make them more suitable for use on hybrid systems. 

New features on Mir for X11 and Wayland

In this new release, we have fixed various issues of our Wayland and Xwayland support and we have made several improvements to our “Mir on X” platform. Here are the more significant enhancements: 

• GBM-KMS back-end now has a new driver-quirks option. 
• –enable-key-repeat is now respected with Mir’s Wayland code
• Timestamps for frame done events are handled under Wayland. 
• Adding the hostname to the window title when remoting via X-forwarding, improving the user experience. 
• Ported to XCB the X11 platform code and now supports resizing Mir-on-X11 windows.

Additionally, Mir 2.4 supports precise floating-point pointer-events with the Wayland platform for high precision input events.

For further information please visit the discourse release. If you want to experience these new features while building your smart display for your project, have a look at mir kiosk.

Try egmde snap 

Egmde is a lightweight, basic, usable graphical shell, for desktop environments. This basic shell includes several keyboard shortcuts and optional support for workspaces and shell components. It’s still in its beta phase, however, you can use it, for example, to test your Mir applications on your desktop before putting them in your device or purchasing a display. 

Want to test our new egmde new snap release! Have a look and let us know what you think! 

Who is using Mir?

Mir can be used in anything from smartphones to signage solutions, you can find it on screens of robots, to IoT devices. Thanks to its security and flexibility, Mir has found its place in several applications. Today we would like to share some applications with you!

Confined desktop

Do you want to run a confined graphical shell and launch applications on a desktop system? Then you might be interested in testing our proof-of-concept snap that demonstrates this. We implemented a new desktop-launch interface for use by snapped desktop shells and launcher apps. So learn how snaps can launch other snaps for this purpose in the following post. 

Retro Pinball 

We love when the community brings their projects to the table. And rzr brings us a nice application of building a retro pinball, arcade-style. Using Mir kiosk, a Raspberry Pi, and Ubuntu Core 20, as the heart of the operation, you can install this entertaining game in your living room. 

Tell us about your Mir  

Are you using Mir to power your next smart display? Do you want to feature in our next blog? We’d love to hear about it and feature it next month. Send a summary to Mir.community@canonical.com, and we’ll be in touch.