Getting Started#

In this chapter, we are going to prepare to setting up the development environment.

Requirements#

1. Linux#

Wayland supports officially Linux only. We need Linux distribution with Display. It means, you can't develop the Wayland clients through the SSH connection.

2. Wayland Compositor#

A Wayland compositor is a server side implementation of the Wayland protocols. Our Wayland client programs need a compositor to communicate.

Weston is the reference implementation of Wayland compositor.

KWin also implements Wayland compositor. If you are using KDE, check if you have this with the command,

$ kwin_wayland --version

If you are using GNOME, check Settings > About > Windowing System field.

There is another popular Wayland compositor called Sway but it is a tiling manager, so it is not suitable for our tutorial.

3. C Compiler#

We need a C compiler for the tutorial. In this tutorial, we will using GCC as the compiler. You can check if it is installed by the command,

$ gcc --version

4. Packages#

Before we begin, the next commands should be installed.

gcc
make
wayland-scanner
weston (optional)

And the Wayland protocols needed. The protocols are XML files. These located under the directory /usr/share/wayland-protocols.

Let's install the required packages.

Arch Linux

Arch Linux (and Arch based distros such as Manjaro) is the best development environment for Wayland clients. Arch packages always provide latest version.

Use pacman to install the packages.

$ sudo pacman -S gcc make wayland-protocols

If your display system is running on X, install weston too.

$ sudo pacman -S weston

Ubuntu

If you are using Ubuntu 21.04 desktop with default settings, it is already running on Wayland. On 20.04 LTS version, some example code may not work because the Wayland compositors provided for this version are not implemented the latest protocols yet.

To install the packages, use apt.

$ sudo apt install gcc make wayland-protocols libwayland-dev libwayland-bin

If your display system is running on X, install weston too.

$ sudo apt install weston

What's Next?#

If you are ready, let's start coding.

Hello, Wayland!