Running Irfanview with Linux using Wine

The newer self extracting EXE format offered as default is not happy with Wine as it seems to require a Microsoft copyright component I don't have just to unpack it! but there is a solution:-

If you click on "other download sites" on the Irfanview download page, right at the bottom is a source to download Irfanview in ZIP format.

The links below are for version 4.35, as Irfanview is upgraded these will need to be amended.

http://www.irfanview.info/files/iview435.zip

Download it and place it in a handy directory or folder, perhaps call it Irfanview - unzip it and you have a working Irfanview.

For the plugins download the ZIP format from eg

http://www.irfanview.info/files/irfanview_plugins_435.zip

into a plugins subdirectory of where you have placed Irfanview. And unzip it. You can delete any plugins that look surplus to your needs.

Irfanview expects the plugins to be in a folder Plugins inside its own directory. So the tree directrory would look something like:

winprogs/
        irfanview/
               Plugins/
               Html/
               Languages/
               Toolbars/

To run Irfanview from the console use the command line "wine fullpathtoirfanview" -

say "wine /mnt/windows/irfanview/i_view32.exe"

Wine will simply run the program, treating the path "/mnt/windows/irfanview" as a dos disk C:.
Or make a desktop icon do this for you.

I use Wine set to emulate XP and Irfanview works out of the box as it were. I even have the OCR tool and Photoshop .8BF filters working.

Version 4.32 with updated plugins now allows you to view the GIMP XCF files although as simple flat files, you can't reverse the image history etc etc. Handy little viewer though. I have not bothered to work on the scanning capability as it needs an appropriate Windows driver.

I can't just play most media (movies and sound) with Irfanview but I haven't found the need to delve into that. MP3 sound files play wonderfully well.

The thought of using Linux to make a windows executable slideshow made me smile. It works.

I am using opensuse 12.x, and my version of Wine is 1.1.9.