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TIFF Viewer

I was unable to find a stand-alone tiff-viewer for the Zaurus in an ipk all of it's own, but I did find a stand-alone tiff viewer in the zfax ipk, which can be used independently without installing the fax software if you do not want it. See:

http://www.iaccarino.de/silvio/zaurusstuff.htm

and
http://www.iaccarino.de/silvio/zfax.htm

The zfax's tiff viewer actually will render jpg and some png files as well. I am not sure about gif files. I like tiffviewer's ability to enlarge images and scroll around while viewing them.

The viewer has a real browser you can choose what directory you want to open. It is much faster than using either Opera or Sharp's image viewer, and I think it will use a lot less space and percent cpu because, unlike the built-in image viewer, it only loads whatever images you select to view. And, now that I have the zfax tiff viewer installed, Sharp's built-in image viewer is finally able to recognize and display tiff-formatted images.

It also seems able to handle many image files that Sharp's built-in image viewer is unable to display. The primary problems I have had are when I don't have enough space on my Zaurus for the viewer to open a file. ( I tend to run very close to full.) For images that are too big, the tiffviewer just crashes. In these cases, I use various linux image utilities to size them down when necessary, by ssh'ing from my Zaurus onto a Linux server which has command line image utilities installed. If you would like to learn more about this, write me at oesf.org to ask me to finish the webpage I started writing about them, or check out the Glyph & Cog's pdfimages command, and ImageMagick's "convert" command.

Zfax's author recommended reading the hints section of his zaurus stuff page for ipk installation hints. However, since I only wanted the tiff viewer, I chose to download both of the following using wget from:

http://www.iaccarino.de/silvio/stuff/efax_0.9a.2_arm.ipk

http://www.iaccarino.de/silvio/stuff/zfax_0.9.6_arm.ipk

I then unpacked zfax_0.9.6_arm.ipk by hand from a special directory I created on my SD card for this purpose, so I could just use the files I needed. The steps I took were as follows:

Create a special directory for unpacking the IPK and preventing unwanted problems in my system

mkdir PATH-TO-NEW-DIRECTORY/
Changed my working directory to the new directory

cd PATH-TO-NEW-DIRECTORY/
Use the "ls" command to confiirm the name of the ipk

ls PATH-TO-IPK/*ipk
Use the "tar" command to list the contents of the ipk

tar -tzf PATH-TO-IPK/FILENAME.ipk
Use the "tar" command to unpack the ipk

tar -xvzf PATH-TO-IPK/FILENAME.ipk
Use the "gunzip" command to un-gzip the data.tar.gz file

gunzip data.tar.gz
Use the "ls" command to see what files have been ungzipped

ls
Use the "tar" command to unpack the data.tar file

tar -xvf data.tar
Examine the "tar" command output to decide which files I need and where I want to put them.

Here is the detailed output showing what I saw on my console screen for steps 3 through 6, when I followed the procedure outlined above. In this example, the IPK was located in my working directory, so there is no special path to it:

bash-2.05# ls zfax_0.9.6_arm.ipk bash-2.05# tar -tzf zfax_0.9.6_arm.ipk ./data.tar.gz ./control.tar.gz ./debian-binary bash-2.05# tar -xvzf zfax_0.9.6_arm.ipk ./data.tar.gz ./control.tar.gz ./debian-binary bash-2.05# gunzip data.tar.gz bash-2.05# ls control.tar.gz debian-binary data.tar zfax_0.9.6_arm.ipk bash-2.05# tar -xvf data.tar ./opt/ ./opt/QtPalmtop/ ./opt/QtPalmtop/bin/ ./opt/QtPalmtop/bin/zfax ./opt/QtPalmtop/bin/tiffviewer ./opt/QtPalmtop/apps/ ./opt/QtPalmtop/apps/Applications/ ./opt/QtPalmtop/apps/Applications/tiffviewer.desktop ./opt/QtPalmtop/apps/Applications/zfax.desktop ./opt/QtPalmtop/i18n/ ./opt/QtPalmtop/i18n/de/ ./opt/QtPalmtop/i18n/de/zfax.qm ./opt/QtPalmtop/i18n/de/tiffviewer.qm ./opt/QtPalmtop/pics/ ./opt/QtPalmtop/pics/tiffviewer.png ./opt/QtPalmtop/pics/zfax.png ./var/ ./var/log/ ./var/spool/ ./var/spool/fax/ ./etc/ ./etc/efax.rc bash-2.05#

I have shown all the screen output below from performing Step 9 for the tiffviewer. If you need more help with Step 9 for other applications, I suggest you ask the folks in an online forum for help if you do not know how to decide which files you need.

After studying the final output of the tar command, I used just the following four of the above files:

bash-2.05# ls -l opt/QtPalmtop/bin/tiffviewer opt/QtPalmtop/apps/Applications/tiffviewer.desktop opt/QtPalmtop/i18n/de/tiffviewer.qm opt/QtPalmtop/pics/tiffviewer.png -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 163 May24 2003 opt/QtPalmtop/apps/Applications/tiffviewer.desktop -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 333896 May24 2003 opt/QtPalmtop/bin/tiffviewer -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1161 May24 2003 opt/QtPalmtop/i18n/de/tiffviewer.qm -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2385 May24 2003 opt/QtPalmtop/pics/tiffviewer.png bash-2.05#

I put them in or linked to them from /home/QtPalmtop instead, and they still worked okay:

bash-2.05# mv opt/QtPalmtop/apps/Applications/tiffviewer.desktop /home/QtPalmtop/apps/Applications/ bash-2.05# mv opt/QtPalmtop/i18n/de/tiffviewer.qm /home/QtPalmtop/i18n/de/tiffviewer.qm bash-2.05# mv opt/QtPalmtop/pics/tiffviewer.png /home/QtPalmtop/pics/tiffviewer.png bash-2.05# mv opt/QtPalmtop/bin/tiffviewer /mnt/card/Programs/tiffviewer bash-2.05# ln -s /mnt/card/Programs/tiffviewer /home/QtPalmtop/bin/tiffviewer bash-2.05#

I have tested with quite a few tiff and jpg files, and it has worked great on my 2.38 collie. I had downloaded the efax ipk as well, just in case I might need files from it, but have not bothered to examine it, at this point, as the tiffviewer from the zfax ipk is working quite well for me as is.