Intel and XMir

Posted Sep 12, 2013 21:23 UTC (Thu) by niner (subscriber, #26151)
In reply to: Intel and XMir by kiko
Parent article: Intel and XMir

Your arguments about focusing and polish would carry much more weight, if Canonical actually focused and polished. But it much rather seems to invest huge amounts of resources into rewriting the whole desktop stack single handedly. From init system to display server to desktop, everything home grown. Seems like a huge task for a small company. I can very well understand that Canonical's engineers don't have time to contribute much to upstream projects. But is this actually helping the Linux desktop? I fear it's actually harming it.

As an application developer, I see for example systemd as a unifying force long overdue. I've never had the time to write init scripts for distributions other than the one I use, but I can be quite sure that my systemd unit files work just about everywhere (or at least will work). Well except for Ubuntu. And sadly they do not even have any good reasons. The same story now seems to be happeing with Mir.

Intel and XMir

Posted Oct 1, 2013 12:21 UTC (Tue) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link] (1 responses)

AFAIK there is no guarantee that your unit files will work (as intended) on every systemd-based distro?

Intel and XMir

Posted Oct 1, 2013 12:31 UTC (Tue) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

Is there a guarantee? Probably not. But I never said I was guaranteed. I said I can be quite sure. For example the following few lines will probably work on every systemd distribution:

[Unit]
Description=X Window Virtual Framebuffer
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/Xvfb -screen 0 800x600x24
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

There might be some obscure system where this might not work. Maybe. Small chance.

Now write a SysV init script that does the same and works on at least the major distributions. After network's up, Xvfb should be started with the given parameters and if it crashes it should be restarted. It should by default be enabled in a multi-user runlevel. And to make things interesting: do it without having these distributions to test. Bonus points for not even having to try to find distribution specific documentation.

Systemd makes this so, so, so much easier. Finally.