The easiest way to view webp images on Arch Linux

Yesterday… Or just early today, I was just looking for some pictures about Misaki Mei, Ano kawaii girl that I came up with at a moment, she was from an anime which cames from a light novel together with a manga. It’s funny that the three edition has quite a different stories. I had only watched the anime during last summer, the picnic anime faded with so cute a girl involved. Who TM would be scared?

That was the case I found some .webp images.

And I found the Gwenview, my KDE Plasma default image viewer, I love it pretty much, but it did not support to view webp image files.

Then I go to google for help, and I ended up finding a pile of like Top n Best Programs to view webp files on Linux, at this time, the google was not better than Baidu as before it used to. Then I used the gThumb.

But gThumb was a mother-fucker program, I did not like it. For I am convinced that GwenView NB.So I was eager to find alternative way to solve the simple requirement of viewing webp images.

Luckily, I found vwebp, I loved this name because IT IS CLEAR. You can easily download vwebp from google’s website(ps: You should search with keyword webp rather than vwebp, which would only give you shit)

You just simply downloaded it and extracted it. the directory will look like this:

zytc@etc:Downloads/libwebp-1.0.3-linux-x86-64 $ ll  
total 52K
drwxr-xr-x 2 zytc zytc 4.0K Jul  5  2019 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 zytc zytc 4.0K Jul  5  2019 doc
drwxr-xr-x 3 zytc zytc 4.0K Jul  5  2019 include
drwxr-xr-x 2 zytc zytc 4.0K Jul  5  2019 lib
-rw-r--r-- 1 zytc zytc  24K Jul  5  2019 README
-rw-r--r-- 1 zytc zytc 8.8K Jul  5  2019 README.mux

and the executable binary is in the directory bin, what you need to do is simply create a symbolic link to the vwebp binary to one of your $PATH directory, generally /usr/bin, as below:

zytc@etc:~$ ln -s bin/vwebp /usr/bin/webp

and it would do what you want. However, I created and try to run the command it crashed with an error.

zytc@etc:Downloads/libwebp-1.0.3-linux-x86-64 $ vwebp --version
vwebp: error while loading shared libraries: libglut.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

it seemed a f**king library is needed for vwebp to run properly. In fact, our system lacked of glut, which provides several openGL operations, you can install with yay -S glut and select the freeglut to install it. After all the stuff get over, it just got its way. then input 

zytc@etc:~$ vwebp ~/gallery/Misaki_mei/ &
zytc@etc:~$ sudo pacman -Rs gthumb-lite

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, F**k, kanojo wa so cute!!!!!(●´∀`●)

Summing Up

so the easies way to view webp images on arch linux is

  • Download the webp tools from google, as above
  • Install glut
  • Create symbolic links or other ways you can get vwebp work.
  • UNINSTALL GTHUMB
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