It's possible to test the new GNOME and Wayland interaction with a Fedora distro

Sep 1, 2014 09:48 GMT  ·  By

GNOME is working to implement official Wayland support for the upcoming 3.14 release and they seem to be more than half way there. It's difficult to test the new GNOME 3.14 Beta updates that have been made until now, especially with the Wayland integration, but a Reddit user posted a short and easy-to-follow tutorial in this regard.

GNOME was supposed to provide official support for Wayland in the 3.12 release, but the developers decided to postpone this new feature. More work was needed on both sides and the devs didn't want to release something that wasn't ready and that could be quite buggy.

More changes and improvements have been done in the GNOME 3.14 branch and the developers have made great progress. In fact, it looks like GNOME 3.14 has managed to gather even more new features than 3.12, which was actually a big success.

The problem with new GNOME releases is that they can't really be tested properly by regular users. The intermediary versions are too short lived and they don't get added into the official repositories or into PPAs. A Reddit user has pointed that there is a Live Fedora distribution available, which has GNOME 3.14 Beta 1 by default and can be made to work with Wayland without having to install the system.

First of all, you will have to boot this Fedora spin from a USB drive and enter into the Live desktop. From there, you will have to switch to command line by entering the Ctrl+Alt+F1 key combination (you can use all the F keys, but it doesn't really matter which). When you are asked for the login, you will need to enter "liveuser" without the quotes.

Now, run the following commands:

code
sudo systemctl stop gdm
sudo dnf install gnome-session-wayland-session
gnome-session --session=gnome-wayland
You are currently running Fedora GNOME 3.14 Beta 1 with Wayland instead of X11. Keep in mind that GNOME 3.14 is still under heavy development and you might experience crashes. It's also worth noting that this is not a hybrid image and this means that you will have to do this all over again, if you restart.

You can download Fedora GNOME 3.14 Beta 1 right now from Softpedia.

Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only. It's possible to install it, but you should do it on a testing PC and not on your regular computer, or at least you should use a separate partition.