Utility idump displays images on framebuffer

March 07, 2019 — BarryK

There is a neat little utility for displaying png, jpeg and gif images on the Linux framebuffer:

There are two variants in this source, one uses the system png and jpeg libraries, and in the 'static' folder is inbuilt png, jpeg and gif libraries. I compiled the latter using musl, and it is 145KB:

https://github.com/bkauler/oe-qky-src/tree/master/quirky/meta-quirky/recipes-quirky/idump-static

This will be in the initrd in the next release of EasyOS. I am using it to display a nice logo. The idea is that the logo will be top-right of screen, with text displaying on the left side of screen. The text can scroll, and the logo will just stay there and won't be over-written as long as the text lines are not too long.

Note, the author of idump also has a nice little framebuffer terminal emulator, named 'yaft'.

Changing the subject slightly, I have introduced a new variable in BOOT_SPECS, named INITRD_X_GUI, which will have either "yes" or "no", to choose whether to use the Xorg GUIs for locale/keyboard and password.

The default is "yes". The GUIs are good for the non-English languages such as Chinese and Hindi. For most of us, they are not needed and we can stay with the text-mode bootup.

Text-mode, yes, but now looking much nicer with the logo.

About time to bring out another release. Lots of things to look at, such as the interesting work that rufwoof is doing with cgroups, however, will get another Easy out of the door at its current state.

Tags: easy