My efforts at getting Ubuntu to play nice with Irfanview, my favorite image editor.

I like Irfanview so much that I made my own website about it at http://www.sticksite.com/irfanview.

NOTE: I never did get Irfanview running under Ubuntu in spite of a great deal of help from the experts whose help I do appreciate very much. I'll leave these notes here, although incomplete, just to show you SOME of the effort we went to.

My setup: An eMachine laptop with Windows Vista pre-installed; I added Linux Ubuntu 8.10 myself and it was running well. I don't want to mess up Vista in case I eventually remove Ubuntu again.

1. I wanted to be able to run Irfanview in Vista also, so I booted the laptop into Vista; not Ubuntu.

2. I downloaded Irfanview (version 4.22) AND all the plugins from http://www.irfanview.com/ and installed them and made sure it was running perfectly in Vista; it was. When I installed this, it went automatically to C:\Program Files\Irfanview.

3. In Ubuntu, I clicked: "System | Administration | Synaptic Package Manager" and in the Search box, entered "wine" which resulted in 4 items. I marked them for installation and clicked to install them.

4. Michael Ward went out of his way to help me with this. As per his instructions:

5. Save these three lines in a plain text file in your "home/kenlaninga" folder; I called it irfanview (don't give it an extension). Look in your menus, you'll have a text editor, maybe gedit or mousepad or something - it will look like Notepad. DON'T use a full-blown word processor. The 3 lines:

#!/bin/bash
cd /home/kenlaninga/IrfanView
wine ./i_view32.exe

NOTE that "kenlaninga" is my "username" in Ubuntu and note the IrfanView foldername has an UPPER case "I" and UPPER case "V".

File | Save as........... and "irfanview" (lower case only), and then closed both windows.



6. Now go "Places | Home folder" and you'll see the new file, "irfanview." Right-click it and choose "Properties." Now choose the "Permissions" tab and put a check-mark by "Execute."



7. AT THIS POINT I do not yet have the Irfanview Folders & Files in the Ubuntu folders/system yet; they ARE in my Vista folders only. So, I booted that computer into Windows Vista and opened Windows Explorer. So, next, I booted that 'puter into Vista, stuck a flash drive into a USB port and copied the entire "Irfanview" folder from C: to that flash drive. Then removed it and booted back into Ubuntu.

8. When back into Ubuntu, I reinserted the flash drive and went "Places | Home folder" but the flash drive did not show up. So then I stuck the flash drive into another USB port and it did. Odd. The flash drive is "TRAVELDRIVE" so I expanded that and all the files showed. Then I opened a second instance of the "Home folder" beside the first instance and opened my "kenlaninga" folder like this:


I tried to drag/drop the Irfanview folder from the flash drive to the "kenlaninga" folder but that did not work; I had to "copy" it and "paste" it, being careful to paste it into the "Home Folder" where it then showed up as "irfanView" (note upper case "V"). Here you see it before I dragged/dropped it.

9. At this point, I thought I could start IrfanView in Ubuntu in one of two ways:
a. Places | Home Folder ..... and then double-click the file "irfanview" but that did not work
b. Places | Home Folder ..... and right-click the file "irfanview" and open it in a text editor (Applications | Accessories | Text Editor) and copy the second line from that 3-line script, and then Applications | Administraton | Terminal ..... and pasting it in there BUT THAT DID NOT WORK EITHER.

At this point I gave up.

John Arve Hjellvik:

was good enough to share this:

I saw your efforts to get Irfan view into linux. maybe you fixed it by now, but at least for me this worked:

Install latest Wine. Download the irfan-install file, make it executable, rightclick and open with wine. Install to default folder. It now works, for me at least. I run version 4.27 of Irfanview.

BACK to my main Linux page.