Running Irfanview with Linux using Wine
The newer self extracting EXE format offered as default is not happy with Wine as it seems to require a Microsoft copyright component I don't have just to unpack it! but there is a solution:-
If you click on "other download sites" on the Irfanview download page, right at the bottom is a source to download Irfanview in ZIP format.
The links below are for version 4.3, as Irfanview is upgraded these will need to be amended.
http://irfanview.tuwien.ac.at/iview430.zip
Download it and place it in a handy directory or folder, perhaps call it Irfanview - unzip it and you have a working Irfanview.
For the plugins download the ZIP format from eg
http://irfanview.tuwien.ac.at/plugins/irfanview_plugins_430.zip
into a subdirectory of where you have placed Irfanview. And unzip it. You can delete any plugins that look surplus to your needs.
Irfanview expects the plugins to be in a folder Plugins inside its own directory. So the tree directrory would look something like:
winprogs/
irfanview/
Plugins/
Html/
Languages
Toolbars
Don't worry about the subsirectories though as Irfanview will create them when you unzip the main package.To run Irfanview from the console use the command line "wine fullpathtoirfanview" -
say "wine /mnt/windows/irfanview/i_view32.exe"
Or make a desktop icon do this for you.
I use Wine set to emulate XP and Irfanview works out of the box as it were. I even have the OCR and Photoshop .8BF filters working. I haven't bothered to work on the scanning capability as it needs an appropriate Windows driver.
I can't just play media (movies and sound) with Irfanview but I haven't found the need to delve into that.
The thought of using Linux to make a windows executable slideshow made me smile.
I am using opensuse, and my version of Wine is 1.1.9. I have placed Irfanview in a fat32 partition with my other DOS and Win 3.1 programs. Never a problem of ownership with fat32 partitions.