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Kushal
Asked: 2012-06-10 20:27:56 +0800 CST

Why does opening Ubuntu's default wallpaper (warty-final-ubuntu.png) in Image Viewer always fail?

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Every time I try to open Ubuntu's (any version, since from 8.04 with which I started) default wallpaper, named warty-final-ubuntu.png, I get an error:

Image Viewer says it's not a PNG file

I reported this as a bug more than a year ago but it is still unresolved. Also I don't get why the default wallpaper is still named as warty-final-ubuntu.png instead of having actual code name prefix to which the wallpaper belongs eg. precise-final-ubuntu.png and so on.

12.04

2 Answers

  1. You're right that this is a bug. Rinzwind's answer explains what is going wrong--eog assumes the file is a PNG because its suffix is .png. That behavior is itself a bug, since sometimes images have the wrong suffix. Most other image viewers will look inside a file to determine its file type (at least if the initial attempt to open it based on its file extension fails).

    I've verified this behavior and marked your Launchpad bug a duplicate of bug 172416, which is the bug for eog's failure to autodetect image type.

    If you need to open an image that has the wrong suffix in eog, you can rename it or, if it's needed with its current name, you can make a symbolic link to it (as Rinzwind explains already exists for the background wallpaper you're trying to open).

    To see how to make a symbolic link, see man ln. Use the -s flag to make symbolic (instead of hard) links.

    For example, if you have a Pictures folder inside your home folder, and it contains a file called foo.png which is actually a JPEG, you can make a symbolic link to it named like a JPEG with:

    cd ~/Pictures
ln -s foo.png foo.jpg

    One key thing to remember when making symbolic links from the command line is that you specify the target first, and the source second. (That is, the link you are making is not the first argument.)

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  2. Best Answer

    You are trying to open the wrong file.

    file /usr/share/backgrounds/warty-final-ubuntu.png
/usr/share/backgrounds/warty-final-ubuntu.png: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.02

    The file is a JPG and not a PNG. You should open /usr/share/unity-2d/warty-final-ubuntu.jpg since it is a symlink to your file:

    file /usr/share/unity-2d/warty-final-ubuntu.jpg
/usr/share/unity-2d/warty-final-ubuntu.jpg: symbolic link to `../backgrounds/warty-final-ubuntu.png'

    Example with your image (eog is the command line name of image viewer).

    enter image description here

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