XnViewMP installation

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XnViewMP

XnView MP is the multi-platform development of the known XnView image viewer, which did reach version 1.99 for Windows and version 1.70 for Linux. The current version as of June 2012 is XnViewMP 0.50. The 1st thing that did impress me as soon as in version 0.12 is how fast XnView MP does build up the thumbnails. It is much faster than other image viewers like GQview, GImageView, etc...

XnViewMP 0.50 installation on Ubuntu 12.04

There is a Debian package available for this version, thus installation is very easy now.

• download XnViewMP-linux.deb from http://www.xnview.com/en/index.html
• right click on file, then
  open with GDebi Package Installer
  (in Nautilus, Thunar or PCManFM)

A versatile tool when it works well

On the PC here, running Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin with LXDE, after closing XnViewMP 0.50 and launching it again, the tree and image preview panes are extremely narrow and must be re-adjusted after each launch, which is rather annoying. The info pane disappears under the preview pane and must be recovered through some uncertain mouse incantations.

The same problem did exist on this PC with version 0.39 under Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx with Gnome. I tend to believe that most installations might not show this problem, else many users would not be amused... Indeed it is not really the same PC here any more, because the motherboard has been changed before installing 12.04. Unfortunately, with this strange behaviour, XnViewMP is not yet becoming my main image viewer...

XnView MP 0.39 installation on Ubuntu 10.04 or 11.10

Installation

• download XnViewMP-linux.tgz from http://www.xnview.com/en/index.html
• right click on file, then extract here (with nautilus or thunar)
• copy full unpacked dir to ~/bin

Applications Menu

To put XnViewMP into the applications menu in Gnome, XFCE, LXDE,

• edit ~/bin/XnVieMP/XnView.desktop, to adapt it to the location where XnViewMP has been installed.
• copy it :
  sudo cp XnView.desktop /usr/share/applications

In Gnome, you could also right click the Applications menu and click edit menu (or launch alacarte in console), instead of the method above.

Look and feel

Under the info tabs of XnViewMP, value lists are displayed with different background colours for the even lines and the odd lines. Under one Ubuntu 10.04 Gnome PC, the even lines were black on dark grey, making them unreadable. Some research showed that the dark grey colour was hidden in at the 17th position in the Palette active, Palette inactive and Palette disabled lines (line 34 more or less).

Manual modification of Trolltech.conf brought the expected improvement. Unfortunately, there are only 9 configurable colours in the GUI of QT4 settings, thus there are 11 colours which are not accessible through the GUI.

XnView MP 0.12 installation on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron

Hints to install the image viewer XnView MP v0.12 for Linux on an Ubuntu box.

Get the tarball

First go to newsgroup.xnview.com/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=18545 where you will find the link to the download file.

Unpack the tarball

Unpack it with file roller which is called archive manager in the context menu of thunar or nautilus.
You can unpack it to /usr/local/bin , but you need to be root to do that.
You can also unpack it to /home/[username]/bin , as the normal logged in user.
Unpacking it, will create a sub folder XnViewMP in the folder where you chose to unpack it.

Manual launch

Open a console (or a terminal).
If you did unpack it to your home dir as in the 2nd option above, type

XnView MP should launch.

Launch via the application menu

To add XnViewMP to the application menu, there are at least 3 ways to go. Either
- Right click on the Applications Menu and select "Edit Menus",
- or go to System/Preferences/Main Menu,
- or go to a console and type "alacarte".

In the tree at the left, go to Graphics and click "New Item".
For the type, select "Application in terminal"
In the Name field, type: "XnViewMP" (without the quotes!)
In the command field, type: "sh /home/[username]/bin/XnViewMP/xnviewmp.sh" (without the quotes!)
In the comment field, type anything you like.

If you try to launch XnViewMP from the Applications menu now, you may get the following error message: "There was an error creating the child process for this terminal".

Frustrating, but the solution is very easy.
1. Open the file /home/[username]/bin/XnViewMP/xnviewmp.sh with gedit (or any text editor, but no word processor).
2. Add a line after the 1st line , where you type "cd /home/[username]/bin/XnViewMP" (without the quotes!). The file may look like this:

3. Save the file. That's it.