Irfanview on Linux
Overview
Irfanview is a fantastic image viewer and batch utility for the Windows platform. But did you know that you can run Irfanview on GNU/Linux, and this post will show you how to do that. There is a caveat, though: Irfanview is not open source. It's freeware. That might turn off some people, but I still choose to use it. It's unparalleled in the GNU world. There are several ways to get Irfanview on a GNU/Linux system, and they all use Wine.
Installing Irfanview with Winetricks
Winetricks is a fancy helper script that
makes repetitive tasks in wine easier. It has an option built-in for
installing Irfanview. It's a piece of cake. Make sure you have wine with your
package manager. dnf install wine Then download winetricks from the link
above and run the install irfanview command. ./winetricks -q irfanview The
-q is for unattended install. If you want to adjust the settings, run it
without the -q. Observe that winetricks mentions installing mfc42.dll for you.
That is needed for the installer only.
Installing Irfanview with a custom-rolled package
You can choose to install Irfanview by assembling a package from the rpm spec
and debian control scripts I've assembled at
https://gitlab.com/bgstack15/irfan. git pull
https://gitlab.com/bgstack15/irfan.git What is in the git repository is the
source for just the packaging. The actual software source code is downloaded
from official web sources upon building the rpm, and upon the installation of
the dpkg file. As I said above, the software itself is freeware, so the source
is not available for distribution. A wrapper for rpmbuild and dpkg-deb is
provided, as usr/share/irfan/build/pack. Run ./pack rpm or ./pack deb and the
system will build you the type of package you specified, provided you have the
rpm-build or dpkg-dev package. For the rpm, you might need to generate
some directories: mkdir -p ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES ~/rpmbuild/SPECS
~/rpmbuild/RPMS ~/rpmbuild/BUILD ~/rpmbuild/BUILDROOT In fact, you should run
all this, which will download from gitlab for you the package source. mkdir
-p ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES ~/rpmbuild/SPECS ~/rpmbuild/RPMS ~/rpmbuild/BUILD
~/rpmbuild/BUILDROOT cd ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES mkdir irfan-4.44-1; cd irfan-4.44-1
git init git pull https://gitlab.com/bgstack15/irfan.git cd irfan-4.44-1
usr/share/irfan/inc/pack rpm The generated rpm will appear in
~/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch. Then you can run dnf install
./irfan-4.44-1.noarch.rpm.
The benefits of rolling your own package
The package provided on gitlab includes a menu shortcut to Irfanview, as well as mimetype defaults for jpg and png. You will be able to see Irfanview in the list of applications when you select a file in the file manager, right click, and select "Open with..." The winetricks option does not include that.
Reference
- Main irfanview site http://www.irfanview.info/
- http://www.boekhoff.info/?pid=linux&tip=install-irfan-view-on-linux
- Main wine site https://www.winehq.org/
- Latest winetricks script https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks
- Irfan rpm and deb package source https://gitlab.com/bgstack15/irfan
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