Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu community manager at Canonical, has posted some updates regarding Canonical's plans for the Mir display server technology. The new display server, which Canonical hopes to deploy on desktops, laptops, phones and tablets, has generated a lot of interest over the past few months. Some Ubuntu-based projects are moving to adopt the new technology, others are avoiding it in favour of the competing Wayland display protocol. Mr Bacon writes: "Our goal has been clear that in Ubuntu 13.10 we will include Mir by default for cards that support it and fall back to X for cards that don't (primarily those that require proprietary graphics drivers). In 14.04 we will deploy Mir but not provide the X fallback mode, and we are in active discussions with GPU manufacturers for them to support Mir in their drivers." While Mir is still under heavily development and therefore not yet ready for day-to-day usage, people interested in trying Mir can find packages for the display server in the Ubuntu 13.10 software repositories.
Kevin Gunn, who leads the Display Server team at Canonical, has some further updates which dig more into the technical nature of Mir. Gunn's status update covers Mir/Unity support, driver support, multi-monitor successes & problems and fallback support using X. Gunn also lays out some details as to what features and bug fixes are in the works and should be complete before Mir lands in the next Ubuntu long term support release.
Canonical is always experimenting, whether it is with display servers, desktop environments or phones. A month ago Canonical launched an Indiegogo fund raising project in an attempt to fund development of an Ubuntu-powered phone. While the funds came in fast at first, they eventually trickled to a halt. The Ubuntu Edge project managed to pull in approximately $12.8 million dollars of the required $32 million, which means backers will be refunded and Ubuntu fans will have to wait for mobile carriers to ship devices powered by Ubuntu. Not all experiments yield positive results, but it looks as thought Canonical has successfully tested the waters and are now aware just how much of the mobile market is interested in running Ubuntu on hand held devices.
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[Linux] Do you have USB devices which regularly disconnect when they are plugged into your Linux-powered computer? If so it may not be a fault of the device as some people have long thought. Sarah Sharp, who has been working on USB drivers in the Linux kernel for eight years and who was at the forefront of bringing USB 3.0 support to the kernel, has made an interesting discovery. Namely, it seems that the core USB system does not give USB devices long enough to wake up which can cause disconnects. "If the USB core attempts to access those ports while the device is still coming out of resume, such as issuing transfers to the device, or resetting the port, the device will disconnect, or transfer errors will occur. This causes the USB core to mark the device as disconnected." No doubt we will soon see a fix for this issue arriving in future kernel updates.
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