With 3 millions board already sold, the Raspberry Pi board is clearly the most popular ARM Linux development board, and must be one of the most successful Linux device that’s designed to run a Desktop environment. However, the Broadcom BCM2835 processor and lowly 512MB makes it hard to run fully fledge desktop environment such as KDE and Gnome, so most people run LXDE via Raspbian operating systems, and it is much more manageable. However LXDE does not support Wayland, which is supposed to replace the X windows system, and it may not look as nice as it could. So the Raspberry Pi foundation and Collaborra have worked together on a new desktop environment called Maynard that leverages Wayland, and is supposed to be “functional, light and pretty”.
This Wayland implementation is based on Weston + GTK, and is using the hardware video scaler (HVS) found in Broadcom BCM2835 to make everything nice and smooth. Although this is still work in progress, you can to try it on your Raspberry Pi by following the instructions below:
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wget http://raspberrypi.collabora.co.uk/setup-maynard.sh bash ./setup-maynard.sh maynard |
Maynard command will start the environment, the first two commands are only used for the installation procedure. This is what Maynard currently looks like in a Raspberry Pi.
But Maynard is not only for the Raspberry Pi, and you can install it in any Linux computer as well, although this will require you to build the code from source (github).
Via OMG Ubuntu
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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This post will soon be 6 years old, I suppose they don’t maintain Maynard anymore.