How to run GNOME live session with Wayland

kwl

Hi. I'm running Solus Linux on a MS Surface Pro 4. The touchscreen works without any issues under Wayland. However, it doesn't appear to work properly (or at all) under X11. The issue that I encountered when I was installing Solus on the Surface was that the live session runs under X11 so the touchscreen was disabled. Is there any way to have the live session run under Wayland so I can use the touchscreen while installing the system?

Staudey

kwl Which desktop environment? I'm not sure if logging out, then selecting a different session works on the live ISOs.

Anyway, the installation is pretty fast, so it shouldn't be too long until you can use your touchscreen on a properly installed system.

kwl

Staudey I tend to use the GNOME ISO as GNOME seems to work best on Surface devices. I've also tried the Plasma and Xfce ISOs which default to Wayland and the Budgie ISO which defaults to X11. I haven't encountered problems with any of these ISOs when using the touchscreen. The only ISO that I've had problems with is the GNOME ISO.

alfisya

From my testing in VM, Plasma ISO uses wayland session and you can logout to switch between session. On the other hand, Gnome ISO uses X11 session and logging out resulting in black screen. This issue may need to be raised as bug report.

WetGeek

alfisya This issue may need to be raised as bug report.

I don't know if it's related, but for a very long time I could only get my GNOME VM to run if I specified the VMSVGA video controller rather than the VBoxSVGA controller that works with the rest of the Solus editions. Is that still the case?

alfisya

WetGeek I don't use virtualbox, so I don't know. I use virt-manager.

WetGeek

alfisya I use virt-manager.

I like virt-manager as well. But virtualbox gives me a bridged network adapter with a single mouse click that allows me to access my NAS shares in VMs.

I never did figure out why I needed to speciy a VMSVGA video adapter with GNOME to avoid a black screen. I just noticed that I'm still using that with my current VM. I don't remember whether it's simply habit, or if I still needed to do that to get the VM to run.

TraceyC

While the 4.6 GNOME live environment boots into X11, with 4.7 it will boot into Wayland by default.
I looked to see if there's a way to get to a Wayland session in the current live environment, but I didn't find anything that worked.

We plan on working on Release Candidate ISOs in the near future to get ready for the 4.7 release. If you'd like to help us test those, you can get access by joining the Release Testers on our OpenCollective.