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Nick Bailuc
Asked: 2014-03-25 19:43:25 +0800 CST

Will 14.04 be using X.Org?

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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)

14.04

1 Answers

  1. Best 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:

    1. 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.

    2. 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 regular unity package. The Unity (major) version in 14.04 remains 7. Here's the unity source package page and the unity 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.

    3. 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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