First light from Weston on Android

A couple of months ago, Collabora assigned me first to research and then make a proof of concept port of Wayland on Android. I had never even seen an Android before. Yesterday, Weston on Android achieved first light!

Galaxy Nexus running Weston and simple-shm.

Improved appearance for the simplest Wayland client

Of the Wayland demo clients in the Weston repository, simple-shm is the simplest. All the related code is in that one file, and it interfaces directly with libwayland. It does not use GL or EGL, so it can be ran on systems where the EGL stack does not support the Wayland platform nor extensions. However, what it renders, is surprising:

The original simple-shm client on a Weston desktop.

What does EGL do in the Wayland stack

Recently I drew some diagrams of how an EGL library relates to the Wayland stack. Here I am presenting the Mesa EGL version of them with the details explained.

Mesa EGL with Wayland, and simplified X as comparison.

Wayland R&D at Collabora

While being contracted by Collabora, I started a Wayland R&D project in October 2011 with the primary goal of getting to know Wayland, and strengthening Wayland expertise in Collabora. During the four months I started the wl_shell_surface protocol for desktops, added screen locking, ported an X screensaver to Wayland with new protocol, and most recently implemented surface transformations in Weston (the reference compositor, originally the wayland-demos compositor). All this sponsored by Collabora.

Nokia N9 Music Player and Album Cover Art

I recently got a Nokia N9 phone. One of the first things I did was copy my music collection into it. Since the player shows also album cover images, if such are stored, I started adding them -- not by embedding them into ID3v2 tags but as separate files, to avoid useless copies of images.

Usually it is as simple as putting a cover.jpg file into a directory, that contains a single album. Sometimes and in some cases, though, that does not work. I found out, that the N9's default music player is supposed to follow Media Art Storage specification. That gave me hints.

Wayland screensaver integration

Continuing on the Wayland screensaver track, I sent a branch for review. The screensaver interface is now fully implemented in both the demo compositor and the demo screensaver. Screenshots below...

A Wayland screensaver

Now that screen locking is done in Wayland demos, it is time to go for the eye-candy: full-screen idle animations, also known as screensavers. The first step was to port an existing screensaver to Wayland. I chose glmatrix from XScreenSaver, because it is cool, and it renders with OpenGL. This way I did not have to port Xlib based rendering to Cairo (yay!).

Here is GLMatrix running as a regular, windowed application on Wayland, using the toytoolkit:

GLMatrix on the Wayland demo compositor.

On Wayland, screensavers can be reduced to pure animation applications, while the compositor handles everything about locking. Next, we need a Wayland protocol extension to actually use this idle-animation in a screensaver'y way.

GLMatrix is already in the Wayland demo repository as a client called wscreensaver, and it requires cairo-gl, just like gears does.