“Wayland is a computer display server protocol and a library for Linux implementing that protocol” This could be used to implement a window & compositing manager for Linux desktop. Weston is the reference implementation of a Wayland compositor.

There is a good instruction to build Wayland, but building Wayland is not easy because it may cause problems on your Linux system if you install Wayland and its dependencies on you system folder (/usr).

Therefore, I recommend that you will install Wayland on a separated environment using Jhbuild. Fortunately, a Jhbuild module file for building Wayland was included in Jhbuild, so we can build Wayland by just running a Jhbuild command.

First thing we need to do is build and install jhbuild from Jhbuild git respository.
Then, follows the below steps. You may need to install several dependencies such as libpciaccess-dev, libxcb-dri2.0-dev, libxcb-xfixes0-dev, libmtdev-dev, and libpam0g-dev.

$ cd ~/git/jhbuild/examples/
$ jhbuild --file wayland.jhbuildrc build
$ jhbuild --file wayland.jhbuildrc shell
$ sudo su -
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/joone/wayland/lib64
$ ./weston

I tried to run Western under X, but it didn’t. Instead, I could run Western outside X. I’m not sure if I set up Wayland environment correctly, but I could run sample applications for Wayland. There is a build script for Wayland so you can also try this.