fim completes me

I got a pleasant surprise today when I updated the ports on my Thinkpad: an update for fim.

Until now every attempt to build fim proved fruitless, but the “beta” version that is dated April 29 compiles and installs without issue.

And why is this important? Because the only “thing” I lacked, since I abandoned X on that machine, was a way to view images. I know fbi is part of the fbida package, but for some strange reason building it requires a large part of the X structure … which to me, defeats the purpose.

I can admit that I tried to split out fbi and build it without X, but I lack the experience and proper know-how to isolate it and eliminate the parts that want X.

On the other hand, fim doesn’t call for anything X-ish, and is working wonderfully for me now.

I will have to tinker with it to get a grip on how all the inner workings are configured, but that’s always the case with new software. And regardless of all the little points, it’s doing what I need it for: viewing images. It works, I’m happy. End of post.

P.S.: I suppose it’s worth mentioning that if you intend to use this in Crux, you’l need to build a kernel with framebuffer support. Or maybe that’s too obvious to mention. … 😐