XFCE on Wayland including some tips about keyboard on both Wayland and X11 usage - 2025-09-05
Since fall 2024, XFCE (4.20) start to work experimentaly on Wayland, in current state, some tips are still needed.
This is a WIP, some information can still be usefull
following previous article about using Waydroid on X11, I finally managed to have XFCE working on Wayland. It's in experimental state since XFCE 4.20. It looks like labwc package was just missing in my case, or that's maybe due to recente update of some XFCE components on Arch. I use mainly Arch Linux ARM on a RK3588 SoC since about 6 months.
Update 2028-09-01, I managed to have XFCE4 working on Wayland on this hardware, probably due to recent XFCE updates. It use labwc as compositor, that depend itself on wlroots. Still have some limitation (keyboard forced to english, no mean to switch (keyboard and iBus should depend on labwc or wlroots layers), parameters not available at least on menus, no screensaver/locker, see also one of the XFCE4 author's blog entry for more details), so I will wrote a new article about some tweaks in this case
ToC
Waydroid: Android on X11 (and Wayland) with RK3588 ARM 64bits computer (aarch64) - 2025-08-10
Using Android on a Linux computer, especially on ARM 64bits (Also called Aarch64) where all appliations will work natively.
As XFCE still doesn't work (at least in my case with Wayland, and that's my prefered desktop, I still use X11. I want to use some Android application on my Desktop computer. However, Waydroid, the Android virtual machine for Linux is made for Wayland display (so the name Way(land) + (An)droid). Weston is of good help to make it working.
Update 2028-09-01, I managed to have XFCE4 working on Wayland on this hardware, probably due to recent XFCE updates. It use labwc as compositor, that depend itself on wlroots. Still have some limitation (keyboard forced to english, no mean to switch (keyboard and iBus should depend on labwc or wlroots layers), parameters not available at least on menus, no screensaver/locker, see also one of the XFCE4 author's blog entry for more details), so I will wrote a new article about some tweaks in this case
WARNING!! Waydroid start some components at root level, it may contains some Google ads/private data or NSA spies, that's probably better to use it on a VM or a system without sensitive content
If you have other Aarch64 hardware you can skip this, but in my case, I use since about 6 month now a Rockchip RK3588 based (ARM 64bits) Radxa ITX board as main computer There is relatively good management of Vulkan 1.4 and Zink since this summer in GIT version, a stable base is available in Mesa 25.2.0 since 2025-08-06) for the Mali-G610 MP4 GPU included in the SoC. the RK3588 NPU start to be managed by the Rocket driver since 2025-07-28 in mainline Mesa, will be available in this first state in following release of Mesa.
ToC
Raylib - 2025-05-03
a C multimedia library with GL/Vulkan and WASM support
Raylib is a nice compact and very portable multimedia library. It manage hardware acceleration and compatibilities problems.
We will see here how to build it (in may 2025).
Emulating RISC-V system with Oreboot and Barebox, using Qemu or RVVM - 2025-02-07
This is a short post about the installation of usage of OreBoot bootloader and Barebox on Qemu and RVVM RISC-V virtual machine and emulators.
- Qemu is a multi-architecture virtual machine / emulator, it manage VirtIO, KVM (kernel virtual machine functions), allowing maximum hardware leverage, and runs on various architectures and system.
- RVVM is a virtual machine / emulator specialized in RISC-V guests, it is generally more fast and efficient than Qemu, as specialized on RISC-V, with a very efficient JIT dynamic translation. Contains a VFIO PCIe passthrough to take benefits of hardware acceleration. RVVM can also work in WASM
- TinyEmu is a light RISC-V (32/64/128bits) and x86 emulator, it can runs with WASM with the help of JSLinux. This demo doesn't have vsync implemented, as requestAnimationFrame() isn't used in JS to WASM bridge. See also The barebox Porter's Guide
- Barebox is a bare metal style bootloader/payload
- oreboot is a Rust language reimplementation of Coreboot a platform initialization firmware (sometime called boot firmware), that can replace the closed source BIOS firmware, or be used on various kind of hardware systems. It also contains it's own implementation of SBI, called RustSBI, instead of C made, standard RISC-V OpenSBI (Open Source Supervisor Binary Interface). RustSBI alone only support LinuxBoot payloads for now. Awesome-RustSBI has interesting links. RustSBI Prototyper is a prototype to create alternative RISC-V Secure Bootloader based on RustSBI. Nice complete Rust language interactive textbook (FLOSS)The Rust Programming Language and the helper Rust by example.
- Platform System Interface (PSI) implements various of them
Precompiled version are available here:
- https://iaota.institute/riscv/emulation-qemu-riscv.bin
- https://iaota.institute/riscv/sbitest_qemu.bin
It will take about 2.8GB in your home directory, subdir ~/.rustup/toolchains for installation of needed toolchain.
This is a WIP, some information can still be usefull
following previous article about using Waydroid on X11, I finally managed to have XFCE working on Wayland. It's in experimental state since XFCE 4.20. It looks like labwc package was just missing in my case, or that's maybe due to recente update of some XFCE components on Arch. I use mainly Arch Linux ARM on a RK3588 SoC since about 6 months.
Update 2028-09-01, I managed to have XFCE4 working on Wayland on this hardware, probably due to recent XFCE updates. It use labwc as compositor, that depend itself on wlroots. Still have some limitation (keyboard forced to english, no mean to switch (keyboard and iBus should depend on labwc or wlroots layers), parameters not available at least on menus, no screensaver/locker, see also one of the XFCE4 author's blog entry for more details), so I will wrote a new article about some tweaks in this case
ToC
Using Android on a Linux computer, especially on ARM 64bits (Also called Aarch64) where all appliations will work natively.
As XFCE still doesn't work (at least in my case with Wayland, and that's my prefered desktop, I still use X11. I want to use some Android application on my Desktop computer. However, Waydroid, the Android virtual machine for Linux is made for Wayland display (so the name Way(land) + (An)droid). Weston is of good help to make it working.
Update 2028-09-01, I managed to have XFCE4 working on Wayland on this hardware, probably due to recent XFCE updates. It use labwc as compositor, that depend itself on wlroots. Still have some limitation (keyboard forced to english, no mean to switch (keyboard and iBus should depend on labwc or wlroots layers), parameters not available at least on menus, no screensaver/locker, see also one of the XFCE4 author's blog entry for more details), so I will wrote a new article about some tweaks in this case
WARNING!! Waydroid start some components at root level, it may contains some Google ads/private data or NSA spies, that's probably better to use it on a VM or a system without sensitive content
If you have other Aarch64 hardware you can skip this, but in my case, I use since about 6 month now a Rockchip RK3588 based (ARM 64bits) Radxa ITX board as main computer There is relatively good management of Vulkan 1.4 and Zink since this summer in GIT version, a stable base is available in Mesa 25.2.0 since 2025-08-06) for the Mali-G610 MP4 GPU included in the SoC. the RK3588 NPU start to be managed by the Rocket driver since 2025-07-28 in mainline Mesa, will be available in this first state in following release of Mesa.
ToC
Raylib - 2025-05-03
a C multimedia library with GL/Vulkan and WASM support
Raylib is a nice compact and very portable multimedia library. It manage hardware acceleration and compatibilities problems.
We will see here how to build it (in may 2025).
Emulating RISC-V system with Oreboot and Barebox, using Qemu or RVVM - 2025-02-07
This is a short post about the installation of usage of OreBoot bootloader and Barebox on Qemu and RVVM RISC-V virtual machine and emulators.
- Qemu is a multi-architecture virtual machine / emulator, it manage VirtIO, KVM (kernel virtual machine functions), allowing maximum hardware leverage, and runs on various architectures and system.
- RVVM is a virtual machine / emulator specialized in RISC-V guests, it is generally more fast and efficient than Qemu, as specialized on RISC-V, with a very efficient JIT dynamic translation. Contains a VFIO PCIe passthrough to take benefits of hardware acceleration. RVVM can also work in WASM
- TinyEmu is a light RISC-V (32/64/128bits) and x86 emulator, it can runs with WASM with the help of JSLinux. This demo doesn't have vsync implemented, as requestAnimationFrame() isn't used in JS to WASM bridge. See also The barebox Porter's Guide
- Barebox is a bare metal style bootloader/payload
- oreboot is a Rust language reimplementation of Coreboot a platform initialization firmware (sometime called boot firmware), that can replace the closed source BIOS firmware, or be used on various kind of hardware systems. It also contains it's own implementation of SBI, called RustSBI, instead of C made, standard RISC-V OpenSBI (Open Source Supervisor Binary Interface). RustSBI alone only support LinuxBoot payloads for now. Awesome-RustSBI has interesting links. RustSBI Prototyper is a prototype to create alternative RISC-V Secure Bootloader based on RustSBI. Nice complete Rust language interactive textbook (FLOSS)The Rust Programming Language and the helper Rust by example.
- Platform System Interface (PSI) implements various of them
Precompiled version are available here:
- https://iaota.institute/riscv/emulation-qemu-riscv.bin
- https://iaota.institute/riscv/sbitest_qemu.bin
It will take about 2.8GB in your home directory, subdir ~/.rustup/toolchains for installation of needed toolchain.
Continue reading ...
Raylib is a nice compact and very portable multimedia library. It manage hardware acceleration and compatibilities problems.
We will see here how to build it (in may 2025).
This is a short post about the installation of usage of OreBoot bootloader and Barebox on Qemu and RVVM RISC-V virtual machine and emulators.
- Qemu is a multi-architecture virtual machine / emulator, it manage VirtIO, KVM (kernel virtual machine functions), allowing maximum hardware leverage, and runs on various architectures and system.
- RVVM is a virtual machine / emulator specialized in RISC-V guests, it is generally more fast and efficient than Qemu, as specialized on RISC-V, with a very efficient JIT dynamic translation. Contains a VFIO PCIe passthrough to take benefits of hardware acceleration. RVVM can also work in WASM
- TinyEmu is a light RISC-V (32/64/128bits) and x86 emulator, it can runs with WASM with the help of JSLinux. This demo doesn't have vsync implemented, as requestAnimationFrame() isn't used in JS to WASM bridge. See also The barebox Porter's Guide
- Barebox is a bare metal style bootloader/payload
- oreboot is a Rust language reimplementation of Coreboot a platform initialization firmware (sometime called boot firmware), that can replace the closed source BIOS firmware, or be used on various kind of hardware systems. It also contains it's own implementation of SBI, called RustSBI, instead of C made, standard RISC-V OpenSBI (Open Source Supervisor Binary Interface). RustSBI alone only support LinuxBoot payloads for now. Awesome-RustSBI has interesting links. RustSBI Prototyper is a prototype to create alternative RISC-V Secure Bootloader based on RustSBI. Nice complete Rust language interactive textbook (FLOSS)The Rust Programming Language and the helper Rust by example.
- Platform System Interface (PSI) implements various of them
Precompiled version are available here:
- https://iaota.institute/riscv/emulation-qemu-riscv.bin
- https://iaota.institute/riscv/sbitest_qemu.bin
It will take about 2.8GB in your home directory, subdir
~/.rustup/toolchainsfor installation of needed toolchain.