strange problem with feh

jamtat · 2016-05-03 15:35:07

I've been using feh to periodically reset my desktop background (feh --bg-center /home/user/image.gif) for a few years now and it's been working great. Recently I've been having problems with it though. I do automatic updates on this system and do not always carefully examine the changes, but I suspect the problems I'm seeing correspond with a recent update of feh and/or associated libs.

Anyway, the problem is that, if I specify the absolute path to the image file--as I've been doing for a few years now--feh errors out and won't display the image. The error message is

feh --bg-center /home/user/image.gif
feh WARNING: /home/user/image.gif - No Imlib2 loader for that file format
feh: No loadable images specified.
See 'feh --help' or 'man feh' for detailed usage information

Oddly enough, though, if, within the directory where the image is located, I run just feh image.gif, the image displays fine. Likewise, if within that same directory I run feh --bg-center image.gif, the image is set as the desktop background, just as expected. So the problem seems to be with feh somehow not coping with absolute file paths, if I'm understanding correctly what's going on here.

Can anyone offer suggestions for how to remedy this issue? I've switched, for the time being, to using xv to reset the desktop background, which works ok. But I'd like to go back to using feh. Input will be appreciated.

Last edited by jamtat (2016-05-03 15:35:50)

jamtat · 2016-05-03 18:47:36

My best guess about this is that feh has somehow lost the ability to interpret forward slashes as directory/level indicators. But I'm no software developer or coder or anything remotely close to that. So I'm sort of guessing here. In any case, I looked around and found a better alternative to the stand-in I'd been using--that is, to xv: it's the somewhat antiquated xloadimage. I just run xloadimage -onroot -quiet /home/juser/image.gif and all is well again. Maybe I'll go back to using feh if it gets fixed or I figure what in tarnation I might be doing wrong. If not, it looks like xloadimage will be a sutiable replacement for feh.

jasonwryan · 2016-05-03 18:56:04

I dumped feh for xsetroot a while back; simpler and doesn't duplicate the fucntionality of sxiv.

Ropid · 2016-05-04 10:38:45

I found this issue on feh's github:

https://github.com/derf/feh/issues/222

It seems it's what happens with certain gif images.

Last edited by Ropid (2016-05-04 10:39:30)

Arch Linux

#1 2016-05-03 15:35:07

strange problem with feh

#2 2016-05-03 18:47:36

Re: strange problem with feh

#3 2016-05-03 18:56:04

Re: strange problem with feh

#4 2016-05-04 10:38:45

Re: strange problem with feh

Board footer