Having trouble opening images in Ubuntu command line

Question

When I'm trying to open an image in Ubuntu command line using the command eog filename.jpg, I get an error reading

Cannot open display:

Could someone please advise what else I need to run before this to open the image?

Note that I am accessing the machine directly, not ssh-ing in remotely.

What are the outputs of echo "$DISPLAY" and echo "$XAUTHORITY" ? — heemayl, Jan 09 '16 at 21:42
If you do this from command line you need to provide the DISPLAY: parameter — Rinzwind, Jan 09 '16 at 21:42
and please do not crosspost across stackexchange sites http://superuser.com/questions/1023875/having-trouble-opening-images-in-ubuntu-command-line — Rinzwind, Jan 09 '16 at 21:43
OP is probably trying to open images in TTY, not the GUI terminal. If you want to open images in TTY you need fbi package — Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy, Jan 09 '16 at 21:45
something like this will work too: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/462043-problem-to-output-to-X-with-eog — Rinzwind, Jan 09 '16 at 21:46
Also, the post in Superuser was because I posted the question in the wrong location so I posted it again on here. I deleted the Superuser post. — tmnsoon, Jan 09 '16 at 21:54

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:23

As it was found out in the comments , OP actually wanted to open images in full-tty environment ,i.e., not in graphical environment.

Natively there are no apps that will allow to open images in full-text environment, however one can install fbi package with the following command

sudo apt-get install fbi

The fbi package operates on rendering the image and writing it into framebuffer memory location , which is reference by /dev/fb0 device.

To ensure you don't need sudo privilege to run fbi, add yourself to the video group with the following command:

  sudo usermod -a -G video  $USER

Logout and log back in. At this point you can open images with:

 fbi path/to/image.png

For more advanced use of package fbi check out one of my other answer about setting TTY background.

1 Answers1