It’s highly unlikely that any particular computer user is completely satisfied with every program that comes with their operating system of choice. Maybe they switch to a different word processor, or a different music player, or even a different calculator or file manager. Perhaps the image viewer is too bloated, or doesn’t have enough features. This article will talk about an image viewer for Linux named Viewnior that strikes a nice balance between speed and editing. It’s blindingly fast in starting, which is great for viewing images, and even offers a few basic editing options, such as rotating and cropping.
About the only problem some users will find is that it may not come as a standard part of their Linux distribution’s software repostories. As it turns out, this isn’t a big deal, as compiling it from source is a piece of cake. Here’s how to go about that in Ubuntu.
First, head to the Viewnior download page.
Next, click the red link near the top to download the latest version of the source code. At the moment, version 1.3 is the latest (click here to download it), but you can always go to the above page to find the link.
Once the download is complete, you can extract the archive to wherever you like.
Now, go ahead and open up a Terminal.
Now, Ubuntu doesn’t come with the right tools installed by default, but typing sudo apt-get install build-essential intltool will download and install a basic set, which is all we need to compile Viewnior.
Compiling Viewnior is quite simple. In addition to the tools installed above, we only need two development libraries. To add them, type sudo apt-get install libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev libgtk2.0-dev and wait for the process to complete.
Once it does, use the ‘cd’ command to change your working directory to the folder created when you extracted the source code archive. In the screenshot below, the folder was sitting on our Desktop.
Now type ./configure to run the script, which will determine if you have the correct libraries and tools installed to enable building the application. On a stock Ubuntu installation, with the tools and libraries just installed, this should run without any errors.
Now, type sudo make install to run the build process and install the program, along with a launcher.
Note: to remove Viewnior from your system, now or at a later point, use the ‘cd’ command to return to the source code folder, type sudo make uninstall, and the program should be removed completely. Just delete the source code folder (and the development libraries if you want), and everything should be the way it was.
At this point, you should be able to find Viewnior in the Dash.
It can now be used as your default viewer, or just whenever you need a change of pace.