FIM – Linux framebuffer image viewer

MMr_Minderbinder about 7 hours ago 49 commentsRead Article on nongnu.org

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Discussion (49 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

aiiotnoodle•about 1 hour 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original OS image and it was running a custom kernel and had the hardware still attached and worked, but it was very outdated so I decided backup and update it, more of a technical challenge than something practical.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.

kristopolous•12 minutes 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

lrvick•about 5 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.

xattt•about 4 hours ago

Do you browse with framebuffer links too? :)

lrvick•about 2 hours ago

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

monsieurbanana•about 3 hours ago

-links +lynx

yesbabyyes•about 1 hour ago

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

hkt•about 5 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.

zamadatix•44 minutes 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.

yonatan8070•about 2 hours ago

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

redsocksfan45•about 4 hours ago

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

This gives you hardware acceleration without a desktop environment.

wazoox•about 1 hour 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 :)

antisol•about 4 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 :)

haunter•about 2 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

anthk•about 5 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.

pjmlp•about 4 hours ago

More like UNIX and MS-DOS concepts.

sylware•about 6 hours ago

Should it be DRM nowdays?

whizzter•about 6 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.

antisol•about 5 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.

anthk•about 5 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...

written-beyond•about 1 hour 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.

globalnode•about 4 hours ago

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

a96•about 1 hour 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.

mnkylikeskbd•about 6 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.

bschwindHN•about 5 hours ago

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

mghackerlady•26 minutes 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

krautsauer•about 2 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.

opan•about 5 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.

gbin•about 5 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)

opan•about 4 hours ago

>where is your fork

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

moritonal•about 5 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.

miki_oomiri•about 4 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.

hagbard_c•about 4 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.

roer•about 6 hours ago

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

debazel•about 2 hours ago

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

dspillett•about 4 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.

Chaosvex•about 4 hours ago

Wait until you find out about Git.

mnw21cam•about 3 hours ago

Yeah, but that one's ok because it's just named after the guy who wrote it.

rlopezcc•about 2 hours ago

Ah yes, renowned Git Torvalds.