FIM – Linux framebuffer image viewer

Comments

Comment by haunter 4 hours ago

It can actually be also used for file recovery/discovery, see the last slide

https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/om_fim/attach...

>seek a ’magic’ signature in the file after opening it, and try decoding it starting within the range of that signature

Comment by kristopolous 2 hours ago

there's a really interesting terminal image viewer based on cellular automata I made almost 20 years ago ... makes every image a bit animated in weird ways: https://github.com/kristopolous/ascsee

Comment by lrvick 7 hours ago

You can also use mplayer with "-fp" to play video on the frambuffer as well.

I have gone weeks at a time without using a graphical desktop at all thanks to these tools.

Comment by xattt 5 hours ago

Do you browse with framebuffer links too? :)

Comment by lrvick 4 hours ago

These days I prefer to ask an LLM to just go fetch content for me as much as possible.

Comment by monsieurbanana 5 hours ago

-links +lynx

Comment by yesbabyyes 3 hours ago

`links` is a text mode browser which is more capable than `lynx` and which has graphics support through the framebuffer.

Comment by mghackerlady 2 hours ago

and elinks is better than both of them :))

Comment by hkt 7 hours ago

This is a great tip, do you have others? I've tried to ditch graphical desktop envs and failed pretty miserably on media consumption and browsing before.

Comment by zamadatix 3 hours ago

I messed with this a bit and found fbdev forces even gpu accelerated video decode or rendered apps (e.g. even terminal text these days) to go through the CPU/RAM copy path whereas a lightweight graphical setup (like a minimal sway with a full screen terminal window open) is zero copy. Minor thing, but I'll gladly trade a little RAM for some battery life + simplicity if I ever do need to open something actually graphical on the machine.

Comment by akdev1l 1 hour ago

If you wanted a minimal terminal with graphical support then you should probably just run a minimal Wayland session with cage + terminal emulator

fbdev is not it, going through the DRM subsystem is much better

Comment by yonatan8070 3 hours ago

I'm curious, what's the motivation for not having a graphical environment at all?

Comment by redsocksfan45 6 hours ago

Don't use mplayer for this. Use mpv --vo=gpu --gpu-context=drm

This gives you hardware acceleration without a desktop environment.

Comment by antisol 6 hours ago

yep! and ffplay will detect your situation and run on the framebuffer if that seems appropriate. I'm sure there's arguments to explicitly tell it to do that, but I've never used them :)

Comment by wazoox 3 hours ago

Ah yes, back in 2004/2005 I got an old laptop (Pentium 200 or something like that) for free that wasn't fast enough to reliably read videos with X11, but it worked fine as a movie watching device for my children using mplayer in FB mode :)

Comment by anthk 7 hours ago

I think this came with fbgs too; and fbpdf2 it's a better fbpdf (no more slow GhostScript convertings), it just calls poppler/MuPDF libraries.

Comment by sylware 8 hours ago

Should it be DRM nowdays?

Comment by whizzter 8 hours ago

I think the framebuffer devices is a least common denominator that is available on even miniscule or emulated hardware whilst anything above thats starts requiring a whole lot more infrastructure.

And honestly, you don't need much more for an image viewer.

Comment by antisol 7 hours ago

This is exactly right - you can get a framebuffer on just about anything, including pretty much any video card made since about 1990, and also more fun things like the little i2c display that your toaster has. No need to restrict relatively simple software like fbi/fim to running on less hardware by using drm.

Comment by anthk 7 hours ago

I used to play videos with the framebuffer just fine and read PDF's with fbpdf2, among watching TV with fbtv and the like. I didn't miss nearly anything, as most games under SDL1/2 can render into FB with

      export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=fbcon

      export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=kmsdrm

And tons of games too, such as Supertux2, Crispy Doom, SDLQuake, FreeCiv-SDL...

Comment by sylware 5 hours ago

This is what I meant: kmsdrm.

Comment by antisol 6 hours ago

another fun one if you're in an exotic situation and don't have a framebuffer (or if you just want to have some fun by making your games to look worse):

export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=aalib

unfortunately it's only SDL1, though

Comment by capitainenemo 4 hours ago

export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=caca is more usable for games

Comment by antisol 4 hours ago

Oh nice! How did I not know it works with caca?!

Comment by capitainenemo 2 hours ago

Works pretty well even. I wish there was a libchafa variant, and ideally for SDL2.

I've even played SC2, The Ur-Quan masters fairly successfully in an ssh session that way. And Frozen Bubble.

Comment by written-beyond 3 hours ago

I shudder when I read DRM after building a embedded display raspberry pi build. There was a problem with Raspberry pi kernel incorrectly detected an HDMI display was connected even though I was trying to display to DSI. The only work around I had was to write a kernel module that would disable HDMI as a possible interface.

Comment by pjmlp 6 hours ago

More like UNIX and MS-DOS concepts.

Comment by globalnode 6 hours ago

this wont work with wayland will it? has to be a raw tty?

Comment by a96 3 hours ago

It does say it runs on Gtk or SDL, so I expect it should.

Though there are also terminal graphics protocols these days. That seems like it would be another neat box to tick.

Comment by aiiotnoodle 3 hours ago

A little while ago when I had a free weekend. I decided I would pre-compute some musings of an LLM trapped in a computer, I had a raspberry pi 1 (or maybe b) lieing around that I had a framebuffer screen for. I think it was a non-standard TFT_ILI9325 from Aliexpress.

The idea is it would display some helplessness comment on the screen like "Help I'm trapped in a computer" etc etc.

Eventually I got the thing booted with it's original OS image and it was running a custom kernel and had the hardware still attached and worked, but it was very outdated so I decided backup and update it, more of a technical challenge than something practical.

I gave it a few tries but eventually the screen would stop working, not helped by the thing being quite slow. Updating in place was probably harder than a brand new OS. Eventually I determined that I'd need to build a custom kernel image using a newer version, something I've never done before and for me it was quite difficult and a little before AI had agents and such to help you along.

I managed to build a custom kernel but the driver for it had been patched out and moved to an optional thing that I had to enable, I was able to build the custom kernel but for some reason the screen wouldn't display anything like it did on the original OS.

I spent a further few weekends on it working really hard to get this thing to work. Eventually I calmly picked up the screen and intentionally pushed down hard with my thumb breaking the screen irreparably.

It was destructive yes but the joy I feel even now being free of this frustration is immense.

I said I would order a newer screen but have yet to do so.

Comment by kevinten10 7 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by mnkylikeskbd 8 hours ago

Related to this are the (rather poorly named) kitty terminals graphics protocol: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/

Yeah it is playful and all, but telling your colleagues to use "kitty" doesn't sound very professional. You might disagree with this, but that doesn't change the overall perception and general take in corporate world.

Comment by bschwindHN 7 hours ago

Did you just... make a new account just to say the word "kitty" is "unprofessional"?

Comment by opan 7 hours ago

The name "kitty" is nothing compared to the attitude and crimes of the dev (destroying bitmap support and telling people to buy new monitors). I will never use, support, or recommend kitty.

Comment by gbin 6 hours ago

A crime?! Please people I don't even know what happened here but removing some bitmap support is a crime now for a maintainer of an open source piece of code? You are not happy with the project then where is your fork so we can assign some crimes to you and get out of our way to not recommend it? (Note: I am not affiliated at all with the project and I don't even know what happened but you really need to take a breather, no one forced you to use kitty)

Comment by opan 6 hours ago

>where is your fork

Luckily there are better terminal emulators out there, such as foot, so a fork is not necessary.

Comment by 3 hours ago

Comment by dirasieb 1 hour ago

hyperbole exists

Comment by moritonal 7 hours ago

Interesting you say the Dev isn't a great person, because I had a hunch when I saw the use of the Lena photo on the front page (https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/it-s-time-to-retire-...). It's interesting how small gestures present how someone sees the world.

Comment by miki_oomiri 6 hours ago

Man… you guys are ruthless. The dude provides a free tool to use, and used a cute named, have opinions about code, and used the most common used photo on his webpage, and suddenly he gets insulted on a public forum by strangers. He's not perfect. Nobody is. He has opinions, and might not even know about Lenna.

You people are gross.

Comment by patates 5 hours ago

As a reply to this comment:

> Interesting you say the Dev isn't a great person, because I had a hunch when I saw the use of the Lena photo on the front page

You say:

> you guys are ruthless (...) You people are gross.

I'm not saying you don't have a point. I didn't know enough to be sensitive on the Lena topic once either, and could have been the target of the above comment. So I think, perhaps, those could have been formulated more constructively.

However, I must say the same for your comment too. Can't we all be friends here? :)

Comment by hagbard_c 6 hours ago

Sure, you can 'see' how 'someone sees the world' just by him or her not abiding to the current narrative. You do realise that the 'Lena' image has been the standard image for these purposes for decades and that some people might not consider the (politically charged) crusade to suddenly ban it from all such use as being the most pressing issue?

I think what you wrote here says more about how you see the world than how Goyal sees it.

Comment by moritonal 4 hours ago

You're right my comment was off the cuff but I stand by it's logic. I didn't say Kovid was a terrible person, just not great. Having not done research into him specifically I just noted with the parent that certain qualities such as supposed abrasiveness often overlap with qualities I dislike, like using the Lenna image.

My point is that using the Lenna image is a signal, just as you rightly point out so is my comment. I know exactly what the image is and is used for. But I also think it's sad that it's politically charged to say using a Playboy image in a literally objectifying fashion as a test-subject by a women who's requested we don't use it is bad.

It's not a sudden ban, it's been an issue since ~2015. Fun fact I learnt in this, Goyal is totally open to changing it (https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/661), it's simply no-one changed it. I'll see if I can, thanks for the correct call-out.

Comment by prmoustache 3 hours ago

> using a Playboy image

In all honesty, until I read about that I couldn't have imagined the original was a playboy image. What is really used and we see online is a cropped portrait of a playboy image. I am not even sure that playboy image may have been pornographic. Nudity != porn. What is sure is that cropped portrait is not in any way pornographic.

So I kind of have difficulties on drawing opinions about that. Surely the model doesn't have any copyright on that photo, rather the photographer/publisher have and apparently nobody has cared. I would not use it today out of empathy given the model would rather not see her image still being used today and how easy it is to replace it. I feel that consent is above copyright laws.

I have mixed feeling about the argument that the presence of that totally non pornographic portrait would make women feel less welcomed in science. On one hand I would say that if they say so, that could be true. On another hand I would ask if these women really are representative of all women? Does it really matters? Should we avoid posting picture of portraits and stick to animals or still life scenes? And if not why should we avoid only women ones?

Comment by moritonal 1 hour ago

Personally I consider the crop part of the problem. By cropping (rather than just picking another image) it "cleans" the image, but retains the context. I could crop many images to be valid as test-images, but people who know the context would still see them for what they are. Lenna represents a time when the highest quality magazine at hand in a laboratory was softcore pornography.

Comment by hagbard_c 4 hours ago

Using the 'Lena' image is only a signal for those who want to signal something. For most people it is just the standard graphic to use when presenting image processing software. There has been a movement to ban the image but that movement is most likely not nearly so widespread as some people seem to think it is. It wholly depends on which 'bubble' you are in whether using that image is a deadly sin or just daily routine. I suspect Goyal used it in the latter way, not to send some signal to the Image Inquisition.

Comment by moritonal 2 hours ago

I want to point out some of the language you've used. You've brought up "current narrative", "crusade", "sin" and "inquisition", when really you seem to be saying "the image doesn't signal anything and the push to remove it is overblown". I disagree with you (for example IEEE has banned it) but I do respect you believe the actual movement that disagrees with is small but influential.

Instead however I would ask you look at the words you used, where they came from, who said them to you, and why you brought them up here. They are strangely charged words for a debate over a picture.

Comment by redsocksfan45 6 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by krautsauer 4 hours ago

If we're going the see-also way: sixels. Especially timg for image viewing. I've also played with https://github.com/cptpiepmatz/nu-jupyter-kernel/tree/main/c... which can be neat but the invocation is terribly clunky.

Comment by chiffaa 2 hours ago

A lot of software projects have names ranging from silly associations to very cheesy puns, and IMO this should never discourage anyone - everyone should have some whimsy when naming things, because it makes names more memorable. After all, people use Python, and name doesn't even refer to snakes!

I personally wouldn't be able to remember "kitty" if it was named "featureful-python-terminal-emulator", and I certainly wouldn't want to recommend it to others under this name

Comment by roer 8 hours ago

The graphics protocol might be relevant, but I fail to see how the rest of your comment is.

Comment by debazel 4 hours ago

Good. More open source tools should be unappealing the the "corporate world". They can fund and pay for their own tooling.

Comment by mghackerlady 2 hours ago

I like it, it's a pun and a cool animal. GNU has a rather silly name (a gnu is an animal and GNU is an acronym for GNUs Not Unix) but it's done just fine

Comment by dspillett 6 hours ago

As much as there are issues people have with kitty's creator/maintainer, which are easy to search for so I'll not reiterate them, choosing a slightly cutesy name is hardly a massively unprofessional act. It isn't like it is called Completely Uncomfortably Named TTY or similar… If you are so uptight that you can't cope with the word “kitty” being used to refer to a protocol, then maybe call it “kay-eye-tee-tee-why” instead?

> but that doesn't change the overall perception and general take in corporate world.

It may come as a shock to you, but many don't really care about the feelings of the corporate world, away from our day jobs. Heck, some of us struggle to care in our day jobs! Luckily my corporate overlords and immediate management are not quite so sensitive.