X successor Wayland 1.2 arrives

Colour management with GNOME under Wayland
Source:  Richard Hughes on Google+ A stable programming interface for display servers and colour management support are two of the major new features in the now available versions 1.2 of Wayland and Weston. The developers say that the stable server API allows a Wayland 1.2 compositor such as Weston to work with more recent versions of Wayland; in their release email, they mention that having a stable API became necessary because external Wayland compositors are beginning to appear. The protocol for Wayland clients was declared stable in version 1.0.

The colour management support in Wayland and Weston was programmed by the main developer of the GNOME Colour Manager; this component can already use the new Wayland feature. Another developer contributed code that allows Wayland and Weston 1.2 to scale individual windows or entire screens, for example in order to display desktop elements in an adequate size on high-resolution displays. Further new features include multi-seat support and a backend and Weston renderer for the Raspberry Pi.

Wayland is being promoted by various well-known kernel and X.org developers and has long been considered the successor to X.org's X Server, which plays a central role in the graphics rendering of current Linux distributions. Mir, which is being sponsored by Ubuntu makers Canonical and is used in Ubuntu 13.10, has started to compete with Wayland for this position. However, the developers of GNOME, KDE and Kubuntu are backing Wayland; in addition, Jolla, a start-up that arose from Nokia's abandoning of MeeGo, recently tweeted that its first smartphone with Sailfish OS will use Wayland.

Shortly after the new versions of Wayland and Weston were released, the developer, who is known only as "nerdopolisd", released a new version of his Rebecca Black Linux. This version of the Wayland and Weston-based Live Linux will use the latest versions of both software packages.

(djwm)