Openbox Desktop with Rox-Filer Icon Bar.

Using FEH Wallpaper Setter, Picture Viewer Under Linux

by Lewis Loflin

(Above) Openbox Desktop with Rox-Filer Icon Bar and XFCE4 Panel.

Also see Scrot Lite Weight Screen Shot Software for Linux

FEH is a light weight image viewer and wallpaper setter for Linux. It has a command line interface and uses very little system resources. It's ideal for use in low RAM or older machines. Here we use it under Debian Wheezey - it works the same with Raspberry Pi or a regular Linux PC.

This is used for both Openbox, Fluxbox, and JWM in my various versions of Linux desktops. It won't work with XFCE or LXDE desktops.

To get FEH open a terminal and type the following if not already installed:

$ sudo apt-get install feh

Still in the terminal, open an image with feh. In Pibang backgrounds are in /usr/share/backgrounds/ or in my live distribution /usr/local/backgrounds/ or /usr/local/bgs/.

$ feh --bg-scale /usr/share/backgrounds/image.file

The image will open - right click on the image go to file then background and select how the image will be set. Close out the image and look at your desktop.

Other scaling options include:


--bg-tile FILE

--bg-center FILE

--bg-max FILE

--bg-fill FILE

To restore the background on the next session, add the following to your startup file (e.g. ~/.xinitrc, ~/.config/openbox/autostart, etc.):

$ sh ~/.fehbg &

To change the background image to soemthing else you could directly edit the file .fehbg in your home directory (this is a hidden file) which gets created after running the command feh --bg-scale /path/to/image.file mentioned above.

See the FEH Wiki.

FEH Picture Viewer

FEH is also a powerful and fast image viewer. Because it is command line program I created a bash file.

There are two options. Drop the file into the image directory or if in your ~/bin folder include the complete path to the image folder.

# some feh commands
# -z, --randomize
# -d draws the file name
# -g sets window no larger than width x height
# -Z, --auto-zoom image fills woindow
# -., --scale-down image reduced to fit window
# -i, --index It creates an index print of thumb‐
# nails, printing the image name beneath each thumbnail.

Note the images be it backgrounds or family pictures can be scrolled through with the left-right arrows or space bar.

Let's say the user is myself and I have images in folder wp:


#!/bin/bash
feh -g 800x600 -Z. /home/lewis/wp/ 
end

Note that with the auto zoom switch "Z" is really small images can be overblown. so if I have an image directory with small and large images leave out "Z".

If the file is executed inside the folder wp /home/lewis/wp/ path can be left out. By the way the wallpaper setter still works.

Small images smaller than 800x600 in this example stay the same, images larger than 800x600 are scaled down.


#!/bin/bash
feh -g 800x600 -. /home/lewis/wp/ 
end

FEH can also create a clickable thumbnail image box of all images in the directory.


#!/bin/bash
feh -g 800x600 -. -i /home/lewis/wp/ 
end

Make sure the file is executable.