Walking in Light With Christ - hip0's personal blog on System Administration, Free Software, Computer Security and Religion

Browse the web graphically in text console TTYs with w3m-img and links2 on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS Linux

Lately, I'm starting to use my tty consoles more and more. Most of the people should be probably aware of the existence of lynx, elinks and w3m enabling the text geek to browse or debug web pages in plain text mode.
Anyhow, for people who did not used one of the aforementioned browsers to text brose the net I warmly suggest you give them a try. For install and short description on 'em see my previous post - Text mode console browsing with lynx, elinks, w3m and links text browsers ...

For people dedicated to only use console and text mode console on their Personal Computer, simply installing and using this text browsers will not allow you to view any images tags in the html.
Nowdays one of the reasons many people would decide not to use console is simply they want to see pictures, hence I believe by having the opportunity to have almost fully functional text browsing in cosnole / or terminal many might choose not to bother with heavy resource consuming desktop browsers (Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera etc.).

A good reason why you might want to use a console browser instead of its Desktop "big brother" would be simply efficiency. Console and keyboard access to commands is always faster!

Besides that, I'm convinced there are many hard core geeks out there, who still can happily live without Macromedia Flash ads and Videos, but can't simply drop off browser image viewing and switch to lynx, for this group of users having support for graphical browsing in console is also a must.

Hence many people who doesn't have a specific requirement for GUI programs but still use (mutt, ssh, vim, mpg321, zgv etc.) to do most of their work in text console, use X windows in conjunction with mimalistic graphical environment like (DropBox, XFCE ...) for the only reason to be able viewing the pictures embedded in web pages.

With all above said, as me is being a guy keen on console tty browsing, while checking the available console browsers few days ago, I've stumbled on a text console w3m browser called w3m-img

What catch my attention on w3m-img is the browser ability to display pictures in plain console tty or terminals.

Here is the description returned by apt-cache show w3m-img

debian:~# apt-cache show w3m-img|grep -i description -A 3
Description: inline image extension support utilities for w3m
w3m-img provides some utilities to support inline images for w3m
on terminal emulator in X Window System environments and Linux
framebuffer.


w3m-img doesn't rely on svgalib for displaying the pictures, but comes with its own written console image display & rendering library called w3mimgdisplay. - /usr/lib/w3m/w3mimgdisplay.

One w3m-img pre-requirement in order to be able to display pictures in plain text console ttys is to have Linux kernel framebuffer enabled..
Actually, framebuffer is enabled by default on latest stable Debian and derivatives as well as on most other Linux releases as of time of writting this post).
Also framebuffer is active for RPM based distros (Fedora, CentOS, SuSE) etc.

The Frambebuffer on or off is controlled via some directives added in grub or lilo configuration (depending on the installed boot loader).
Here is the time to say, some people can only boot their PCs with the framebuffer kernel support switched off at boot time. Unfortunately this unlucky ones, would not be able to use the picture rendering w3m-img cpabilities.

For people who can't run their Linux distro with a framebuffer kernel support enabled there is a custom hacked version of links - console text browser called links-graphic. links-graphic supports both console graphical text browsing using the framebuffer or alternatively svgalib as a console graphics render machine.

I used to be actively, using links-graphics quite often about 8 years ago and remembering it brings me good memories of the good old console "hacking" years :)

Anyways, w3m-img packaged version is currently available for both rpm and deb based Linux distributions. Here is how to install on both.

1.Install and use w3m-img on Debian, Ubuntu, Mint Linux-es

debian:~# apt-get --yes install w3m-img
....


This should install w3m-img, if there is already no previous install of w3m package on the system.
In case you have the w3m deb installed, you will have to first remove the existing w3m installed version before insatlling the w3m-img package, otherwise you will probably end up with an installation conflict (at least I got such a dependency conflict while apt-getting). Probably the conflict would never occur if aptitude install w3m-img is used instead ....

Using w3m-img is exactly the same as using the w3m text only browser version. Below is a screenshot example of w3m-img in action:

debian:~# w3m http://images.google.com






As you can see in the upper screenshots w3m-img displays pictures pretty nice, whether iven images.google.com search functionality works fine.
Generally a lot of pages looks cool with w3m-img.
Some elements placement comes odd but this is normal since w3m text browser doesn't have any support for javascript.

For those people who would like to have both javascript basic support and images in a plain text console browsing you, again you will have to compile links from source manually with svgalib support enabled.

2. Installing w3m-img to text-browse with images on Fedora, CentoS, RHEL, Redhat etc.

[root@centos ~]# yum -y install w3m-img
....


A very cool thing of w3m graphical console support is its support for most major image formats including animated GIF files :)

The way animated GIFs are viewed is very old school, here is a notice extracted from README.img

Notice
If you want to see GIF animation, please hit a suitable key, such
as 'h', 'l', etc., repeatedly, because a frame is rewritten
according to the re-drawing demand from w3m.
Some code in w3mimg/fb/fb.c was originally written by Mr. Yamasaki.
http://www.sainet.or.jp/~yamasaki/download/fb-sample.tar.gz

As one can read in order to see an animated GIF file with w3m you will have to keep pumping the h or l key or Enter key :D
Here is the also the complete list of Supported browser features mentioned in README.img

Support

* Display inline image (GIF,PNG,JPEG, etc.) on terminals
(xterm,rxvt, etc.) of X11 or Linux framebuffer device.
* Support inline image of tag.
Support of attributes "width", "height", and "align".
* Direct display of image file which header is "Content-type: image/*"
* Support of

Something else which I find worthy to mention is whether a webpage has a Adobe Flash .swf or .flv files embedded, they're simply ignored and the w3m keeps running stable (no strange flash crashes!).

While website with flash is opened in w3m, Adobe Flash's field on the screen shows either a blank rectangle or an empty square (depending on the site embedded flash banner dimensions and form).



Stability of w3m in opening flash website is something really nice. I say this because I still remember how terrible the situation with links with svgalib support was. Back in the day whether a "flash enabled" website was opened most of the time the browser was core dumping.

3. Install and use links2 on Debian and derivatives Linux to browse in console graphically with javascript support

As I mentioned earlier, there is a hacked version of links browser called links-graphics
This hacked version is available as a package within Debian, Ubuntu and presumably most if not all of the rest deb based Linux distros. On Fedora and the other RPM family Linuces links-graphics, should be downloaded separately as rpm and installed and is not available from default repositories.

On Debian distros links-graphics is available by installing links2.
debian:~# apt-get install --yes links2
....


Later to start links2 in graphics mode in lets say tty1 on a machine booted its kernel with framebuffer support, type:

debian:~# links2 -driver fb http://images.google.com


links2 looks, way better in console than w3m but this is quite normal, as links is way more user friednly text browser than its w3m competitor.

For those, using their console ttys without framebuffer enabled you can alternatively run links2 with its svgalib graphics support like so:

debian:~# links2 -driver svgalib -mode 320x200x16 http://images.google.com




Note that the svgalib driver is not working on my machine, as my Linux kernel framebuffer is enabled. Probably if I want to use links2 through the svgalib I will have to reboot and boot machine with framebuffer kernel support switched off...

links2 also supports X window graphics and is a great for Graphical environment browser substitute to CPU intensive Iceweasel / Firefox or Google Chrome. Links2 use as a default browser in X windows is a probably a perfect choice for scientiests and people who does not need support for Adobe Flash Playeror HTML5 standards.

To use links in XFCE or GNOME Desktop env, the quickest way is to prepare new Application Launcher to run command:

debian:~# links2 -g




Also I find it useful to use a quick alias to links -g in my ~/.bashrc in order to allow easier browsing from console by typing xlinks someurladdress.com

If you want to add the same shell alias as me issue:

debian:~# echo 'alias xlinks='links2 -g $1' >> ~/.bashrc


4. Install links with graphics console support on Fedora, CentOS and RHEL

[root@fedora ~]# cd /usr/local/src
[root@fedora src]# wget -q http://jakub.horky.net/rpm/links/links-2.1pre15-2/links-2.1pre15-2.i386.rpm
[root@fedora src]# rpm -ivh --nodeps links-2.1pre15-2/links-2.1pre15-2.i386.rpm
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
Installing... ########################################### [100%]


If you get some errors with missing libraries after installing and launching links2, try to resolve them by manually linking them with ln or look for the library package rpm versions and install them via yum. Another alternative is to fetch the links2 source from Links2 official website links.twibright.com and build from source.

Since last time many years ago I used links2, I should say it evolved a lot. The version I tried did not crash, whether a flash websites are opened and generally it seemed to work quite stable.
To sum it up most people, will probably want to use Links2 for console graphical browsing as the speed and support for HTML and Javascript and web site formatting is way advanced than w3m-img

I haven't compared the speed of opening pages, but since w3m-img is html and graphics render is more simple than xlinks I suppose at some occasions w3m-img will be faster in site rendering. Still links2 performs really light fast and its web page opening time is swift, if compared to most if not all traditional desktop browsers used nowdays.

Using links2 instead of traditional desktop browser in some cases could improve website browsing time if properly used.

I haven't thoroughfully researched if there are other w3m-img, links2 alternatives programs for Linux / BSD. If you know amy other console browsers with image viewing support pls let me know.

Happy Browsing ;)