Ah yes, back in 2004/2005 I got an old laptop (Pentium 200 or something like that) for free that wasn't fast enough to reliably read videos with X11, but it worked fine as a movie watching device for my children using mplayer in FB mode :)
This is a great tip, do you have others? I've tried to ditch graphical desktop envs and failed pretty miserably on media consumption and browsing before.
yep! and ffplay will detect your situation and run on the framebuffer if that seems appropriate. I'm sure there's arguments to explicitly tell it to do that, but I've never used them :)
I think the framebuffer devices is a least common denominator that is available on even miniscule or emulated hardware whilst anything above thats starts requiring a whole lot more infrastructure.
And honestly, you don't need much more for an image viewer.
This is exactly right - you can get a framebuffer on just about anything, including pretty much any video card made since about 1990, and also more fun things like the little i2c display that your toaster has. No need to restrict relatively simple software like fbi/fim to running on less hardware by using drm.
I used to play videos with the framebuffer just fine and read PDF's with fbpdf2, among watching TV with fbtv and the like. I didn't miss nearly anything, as most games under SDL1/2 can render into FB with
export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=fbcon
or
export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=kmsdrm
And tons of games too, such as Supertux2, Crispy Doom, SDLQuake, FreeCiv-SDL...
another fun one if you're in an exotic situation and don't have a framebuffer (or if you just want to have some fun by making your games to look worse):
Yeah it is playful and all, but telling your colleagues to use "kitty" doesn't sound very professional. You might disagree with this, but that doesn't change the overall perception and general take in corporate world.
The name "kitty" is nothing compared to the attitude and crimes of the dev (destroying bitmap support and telling people to buy new monitors). I will never use, support, or recommend kitty.
A crime?! Please people I don't even know what happened here but removing some bitmap support is a crime now for a maintainer of an open source piece of code?
You are not happy with the project then where is your fork so we can assign some crimes to you and get out of our way to not recommend it?
(Note: I am not affiliated at all with the project and I don't even know what happened but you really need to take a breather, no one forced you to use kitty)
Interesting you say the Dev isn't a great person, because I had a hunch when I saw the use of the Lena photo on the front page (https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/it-s-time-to-retire-...). It's interesting how small gestures present how someone sees the world.
Man… you guys are ruthless. The dude provides a free tool to use, and used a cute named, have opinions about code, and used the most common used photo on his webpage, and suddenly he gets insulted on a public forum by strangers. He's not perfect. Nobody is. He has opinions, and might not even know about Lenna.
> Interesting you say the Dev isn't a great person, because I had a hunch when I saw the use of the Lena photo on the front page
You say:
> you guys are ruthless (...) You people are gross.
I'm not saying you don't have a point. I didn't know enough to be sensitive on the Lena topic once either, and could have been the target of the above comment. So I think, perhaps, those could have been formulated more constructively.
However, I must say the same for your comment too. Can't we all be friends here? :)
Sure, you can 'see' how 'someone sees the world' just by him or her not abiding to the current narrative. You do realise that the 'Lena' image has been the standard image for these purposes for decades and that some people might not consider the (politically charged) crusade to suddenly ban it from all such use as being the most pressing issue?
I think what you wrote here says more about how you see the world than how Goyal sees it.
You're right my comment was off the cuff but I stand by it's logic. I didn't say Kovid was a terrible person, just not great. Having not done research into him specifically I just noted with the parent that certain qualities such as supposed abrasiveness often overlap with qualities I dislike, like using the Lenna image.
My point is that using the Lenna image is a signal, just as you rightly point out so is my comment. I know exactly what the image is and is used for. But I also think it's sad that it's politically charged to say using a Playboy image in a literally objectifying fashion as a test-subject by a women who's requested we don't use it is bad.
It's not a sudden ban, it's been an issue since ~2015. Fun fact I learnt in this, Goyal is totally open to changing it (https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/661), it's simply no-one changed it. I'll see if I can, thanks for the correct call-out.
In all honesty, until I read about that I couldn't have imagined the original was a playboy image. What is really used and we see online is a cropped portrait of a playboy image. I am not even sure that playboy image may have been pornographic. Nudity != porn. What is sure is that cropped portrait is not in any way pornographic.
So I kind of have difficulties on drawing opinions about that. Surely the model doesn't have any copyright on that photo, rather the photographer/publisher have and apparently nobody has cared. I would not use it today out of empathy given the model would rather not see her image still being used today and how easy it is to replace it. I feel that consent is above copyright laws.
I have mixed feeling about the argument that the presence of that totally non pornographic portrait would make women feel less welcomed in science. On one hand I would say that if they say so, that could be true. On another hand I would ask if these women really are representative of all women? Does it really matters? Should we avoid posting picture of portraits and stick to animals or still life scenes? And if not why should we avoid only women ones?
Using the 'Lena' image is only a signal for those who want to signal something. For most people it is just the standard graphic to use when presenting image processing software. There has been a movement to ban the image but that movement is most likely not nearly so widespread as some people seem to think it is. It wholly depends on which 'bubble' you are in whether using that image is a deadly sin or just daily routine. I suspect Goyal used it in the latter way, not to send some signal to the Image Inquisition.
As much as there are issues people have with kitty's creator/maintainer, which are easy to search for so I'll not reiterate them, choosing a slightly cutesy name is hardly a massively unprofessional act. It isn't like it is called Completely Uncomfortably Named TTY or similar… If you are so uptight that you can't cope with the word “kitty” being used to refer to a protocol, then maybe call it “kay-eye-tee-tee-why” instead?
> but that doesn't change the overall perception and general take in corporate world.
It may come as a shock to you, but many don't really care about the feelings of the corporate world, away from our day jobs. Heck, some of us struggle to care in our day jobs! Luckily my corporate overlords and immediate management are not quite so sensitive.
You can also use mplayer with "-fp" to play video on the frambuffer as well.
I have gone weeks at a time without using a graphical desktop at all thanks to these tools.
Ah yes, back in 2004/2005 I got an old laptop (Pentium 200 or something like that) for free that wasn't fast enough to reliably read videos with X11, but it worked fine as a movie watching device for my children using mplayer in FB mode :)
Do you browse with framebuffer links too? :)
These days I prefer to ask an LLM to just go fetch content for me as much as possible.
-links +lynx
This is a great tip, do you have others? I've tried to ditch graphical desktop envs and failed pretty miserably on media consumption and browsing before.
I'm curious, what's the motivation for not having a graphical environment at all?
Don't use mplayer for this. Use mpv --vo=gpu --gpu-context=drm
This gives you hardware acceleration without a desktop environment.
yep! and ffplay will detect your situation and run on the framebuffer if that seems appropriate. I'm sure there's arguments to explicitly tell it to do that, but I've never used them :)
It can actually be also used for file recovery/discovery, see the last slide
https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/om_fim/attach...
>seek a ’magic’ signature in the file after opening it, and try decoding it starting within the range of that signature
I think this came with fbgs too; and fbpdf2 it's a better fbpdf (no more slow GhostScript convertings), it just calls poppler/MuPDF libraries.
More like UNIX and MS-DOS concepts.
Should it be DRM nowdays?
I think the framebuffer devices is a least common denominator that is available on even miniscule or emulated hardware whilst anything above thats starts requiring a whole lot more infrastructure.
And honestly, you don't need much more for an image viewer.
This is exactly right - you can get a framebuffer on just about anything, including pretty much any video card made since about 1990, and also more fun things like the little i2c display that your toaster has. No need to restrict relatively simple software like fbi/fim to running on less hardware by using drm.
I used to play videos with the framebuffer just fine and read PDF's with fbpdf2, among watching TV with fbtv and the like. I didn't miss nearly anything, as most games under SDL1/2 can render into FB with
or And tons of games too, such as Supertux2, Crispy Doom, SDLQuake, FreeCiv-SDL...This is what I meant: kmsdrm.
another fun one if you're in an exotic situation and don't have a framebuffer (or if you just want to have some fun by making your games to look worse):
export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=aalib
unfortunately it's only SDL1, though
export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=caca is more usable for games
Oh nice! How did I not know it works with caca?!
this wont work with wayland will it? has to be a raw tty?
Related to this are the (rather poorly named) kitty terminals graphics protocol: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/
Yeah it is playful and all, but telling your colleagues to use "kitty" doesn't sound very professional. You might disagree with this, but that doesn't change the overall perception and general take in corporate world.
Did you just... make a new account just to say the word "kitty" is "unprofessional"?
If we're going the see-also way: sixels. Especially timg for image viewing. I've also played with https://github.com/cptpiepmatz/nu-jupyter-kernel/tree/main/c... which can be neat but the invocation is terribly clunky.
Good. More open source tools should be unappealing the the "corporate world". They can fund and pay for their own tooling.
The name "kitty" is nothing compared to the attitude and crimes of the dev (destroying bitmap support and telling people to buy new monitors). I will never use, support, or recommend kitty.
A crime?! Please people I don't even know what happened here but removing some bitmap support is a crime now for a maintainer of an open source piece of code? You are not happy with the project then where is your fork so we can assign some crimes to you and get out of our way to not recommend it? (Note: I am not affiliated at all with the project and I don't even know what happened but you really need to take a breather, no one forced you to use kitty)
>where is your fork
Luckily there are better terminal emulators out there, such as foot, so a fork is not necessary.
Interesting you say the Dev isn't a great person, because I had a hunch when I saw the use of the Lena photo on the front page (https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/it-s-time-to-retire-...). It's interesting how small gestures present how someone sees the world.
Man… you guys are ruthless. The dude provides a free tool to use, and used a cute named, have opinions about code, and used the most common used photo on his webpage, and suddenly he gets insulted on a public forum by strangers. He's not perfect. Nobody is. He has opinions, and might not even know about Lenna.
You people are gross.
As a reply to this comment:
> Interesting you say the Dev isn't a great person, because I had a hunch when I saw the use of the Lena photo on the front page
You say:
> you guys are ruthless (...) You people are gross.
I'm not saying you don't have a point. I didn't know enough to be sensitive on the Lena topic once either, and could have been the target of the above comment. So I think, perhaps, those could have been formulated more constructively.
However, I must say the same for your comment too. Can't we all be friends here? :)
Sure, you can 'see' how 'someone sees the world' just by him or her not abiding to the current narrative. You do realise that the 'Lena' image has been the standard image for these purposes for decades and that some people might not consider the (politically charged) crusade to suddenly ban it from all such use as being the most pressing issue?
I think what you wrote here says more about how you see the world than how Goyal sees it.
You're right my comment was off the cuff but I stand by it's logic. I didn't say Kovid was a terrible person, just not great. Having not done research into him specifically I just noted with the parent that certain qualities such as supposed abrasiveness often overlap with qualities I dislike, like using the Lenna image.
My point is that using the Lenna image is a signal, just as you rightly point out so is my comment. I know exactly what the image is and is used for. But I also think it's sad that it's politically charged to say using a Playboy image in a literally objectifying fashion as a test-subject by a women who's requested we don't use it is bad.
It's not a sudden ban, it's been an issue since ~2015. Fun fact I learnt in this, Goyal is totally open to changing it (https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/661), it's simply no-one changed it. I'll see if I can, thanks for the correct call-out.
> using a Playboy image
In all honesty, until I read about that I couldn't have imagined the original was a playboy image. What is really used and we see online is a cropped portrait of a playboy image. I am not even sure that playboy image may have been pornographic. Nudity != porn. What is sure is that cropped portrait is not in any way pornographic.
So I kind of have difficulties on drawing opinions about that. Surely the model doesn't have any copyright on that photo, rather the photographer/publisher have and apparently nobody has cared. I would not use it today out of empathy given the model would rather not see her image still being used today and how easy it is to replace it. I feel that consent is above copyright laws.
I have mixed feeling about the argument that the presence of that totally non pornographic portrait would make women feel less welcomed in science. On one hand I would say that if they say so, that could be true. On another hand I would ask if these women really are representative of all women? Does it really matters? Should we avoid posting picture of portraits and stick to animals or still life scenes? And if not why should we avoid only women ones?
Using the 'Lena' image is only a signal for those who want to signal something. For most people it is just the standard graphic to use when presenting image processing software. There has been a movement to ban the image but that movement is most likely not nearly so widespread as some people seem to think it is. It wholly depends on which 'bubble' you are in whether using that image is a deadly sin or just daily routine. I suspect Goyal used it in the latter way, not to send some signal to the Image Inquisition.
The graphics protocol might be relevant, but I fail to see how the rest of your comment is.
As much as there are issues people have with kitty's creator/maintainer, which are easy to search for so I'll not reiterate them, choosing a slightly cutesy name is hardly a massively unprofessional act. It isn't like it is called Completely Uncomfortably Named TTY or similar… If you are so uptight that you can't cope with the word “kitty” being used to refer to a protocol, then maybe call it “kay-eye-tee-tee-why” instead?
> but that doesn't change the overall perception and general take in corporate world.
It may come as a shock to you, but many don't really care about the feelings of the corporate world, away from our day jobs. Heck, some of us struggle to care in our day jobs! Luckily my corporate overlords and immediate management are not quite so sensitive.
Wait until you find out about Git.
Yeah, but that one's ok because it's just named after the guy who wrote it.
Ah yes, renowned Git Torvalds.