Building 'xv' on Ubuntu

I have a particular fondness for an ancient image viewer called xv, written by John Bradley and last updated—if you can believe it—in 1996. It’s a little quirky, especially on modern window managers, and doesn’t handle huge image files very well. But it’s extremely fast and offers a wealth of features.

Thanks to a small community of enthusiasts, the 20+ year old code can still be compiled on modern Linux systems. Here’s what I did to get it compiled on Ubuntu.

1. Install the following development packages:

   • xorg-dev (installed 80 other packages!)
   • libjpeg-dev
   • libtiff-dev
   • libpng-dev
   • libz-dev

2. Install libjasper-dev from another source (it disappeared from the main Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS repository, but is still available from 16.04-6 LTS):
     add-apt-repository "deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security main"   apt-get update
  apt-get install libjasper-dev

3. Download the “RPM Fusion” patches from GitHib and unpack them:

   wget -O xv-master.zip https://github.com/rpmfusion/xv/archive/master.zip
   unzip -q xv-master.zip
   

4. Change to the xv-master directory:

   cd xv-master
   

5. Download the xv source code from John Bradley’s FTP site and unpack the archive:

   wget ftp://ftp.trilon.com/pub/xv/xv-3.10a.tar.gz
   tar xzf xv-3.10a.tar.gz
   

6. Download the Jumbo patches from SourceForge and unpack them:

   wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/png-mng/xv-3.10a-jumbo-patches-20070520.tar.gz 
   tar xzf xv-3.10a-jumbo-patches-20070520.tar.gz
   

7. Change to the xv-3.10a source directory:

   cd xv-3.10a
   

8. Run the following script to apply the patches:

   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

   #!/bin/bash for PATCH in xv-3.10a-jumbo-fix-enh-patch-20070520.txt \ xv-jumbo-20070520-makefile.patch \ xv-3.10a-enhancements.20070520-20081216.diff \ xv-3.10a-cleanup.patch xv-FLmask.v2.1.patch \ xv-wait.patch xv-3.10a-libpng15.patch \ xv-3.10a-namemax.patch xv-3.10a-xvcut.patch \ xv-3.10a-format.patch xv-3.10a-png-itxt.patch \ xv-3.10a-smooth-fix2.patch xv-3.10a-signal.patch do echo ">>> Applying patch \"$PATCH\"" P1="-p1" [ "$PATCH" == 'xv-3.10a-libpng15.patch' ] && P1="" [ "$PATCH" == 'xv-3.10a-format.patch' ] && P1="" [ "$PATCH" == 'xv-3.10a-signal.patch' ] && P1="" patch $P1 < ../$PATCH echo done

9. Apply some additional patches to install to /opt and shorten the version number:

   sed --in-place 's,^PREFIX = .*,PREFIX = /opt/xv-3.10u,; s/^\(LIBS = .*\)/\1 -lXt/' Makefile
   sed --in-place 's/^\(#define VERSTR\).*/\1 "3.10u"/' xv.h
   

10. Build the program:

    time make 2>&1 | tee build.1.make.text
    

11. If make was successful, install:

    sudo make install
    sudo mv docs /opt/xv-3.10u/share
    sudo rm -f /opt/xv-3.10u/share/doc/*man   # (They're already in share/man)
    sudo ln -s xv-3.10u /opt/xv
    cd /usr/bin
    for FILE in xv bggen vdcomp xcmap xvpictoppm; do sudo ln -s /opt/xv/bin/$FILE; done