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Using Mir on a PC {#using_mir_on_pc}
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Before you can use Mir you need to ensure you have the proper custom Mesa build
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installed. If you installed Mir using the packages from mir-team staging PPA
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(see \ref installing_prebuilt_on_pc), you should be good to go.
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If you built Mir from source code (see \ref building_source_for_pc), you need
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to ensure you are using the proper Mesa at runtime. You can do that by
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installing the Mesa packages manually from the staging PPA, or by building the
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custom Mesa yourself and ensuring it can be found by mir, e.g., by using
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Using Mir as system compositor with X
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-------------------------------------
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Note: for this to work you need to have Mir and all its dependencies (which
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include lightdm, Mesa and the Xorg drivers). The easiest way is to install
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pre-built packages from the staging PPA.
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To run X sessions under Mir, with Mir acting as the system compositor, edit
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your /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf to look to look like this:
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greeter-session=unity-greeter
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$ sudo service lightdm restart
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In theory, you should now find yourself back in Ubuntu and not notice
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anything different. You can verify you're in mir several ways:
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$ grep -i xmir /var/log/Xorg.0.log
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$ ls -l /var/log/lightdm/mir.log
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You can also run Mir natively. To do so, log in to VT1 (Ctrl+Alt+F1) _after_
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you are already logged in to X. If you do so before then you will not be
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assigned adequate credentials to access the graphics hardware and will get
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Note that you can switch back to X using Alt+F7. But it is very important to
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remember NOT to switch once you have any mir binaries running. Doing so will
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currently make X die (!).
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Now we want to run the mir server and a client to render something. The trick
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is that we need to make sure the mir server is easy to terminate before ever
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switching back to X. To ensure this, the server needs to be in the foreground,
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but starting before your client (in the background). To do this, you must:
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$ (sleep 3; some-mir-client) & mir ; kill $!
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Wait 3 seconds and the client will start. You can kill it with Ctrl+C. REMEMBER
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to kill the mir processes fully before attempting to switch back to X or your X
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In case you accidentally killed your X login and ended up with a failsafe
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screen, you might find on subsequent reboots you can't log in to X at all any
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more (it instantly and silently takes you back to the login screen). The fix
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for this is to log in to a VT and:
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$ sudo restart lightdm
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Getting some example client applications
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----------------------------------------
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If you installed mir using the packages from the mir-team staging PPA, you can
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get some example programs by installing the `libmirclient-demos` package:
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$ sudo apt-get install libmirclient-demos
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If you are building from source you can find client applications in the bin/
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subdirectory of the build directory.
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doc/using_mir_on_pc.md
