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Amiga 500 and some random floppy disks. Rendered.

For my sins, I have a large folder full of .iff files, which I wanted to convert into a useable format.

GIMP has a plugin which can read .iff files, but you’ll need to build it yourself. Seems like a lot of effort for some pictures.

Thankfully ilbtoppm is available for most Linux distros and can convert to .ppm, which is readable by most image editors.

The command line for ilbtoppm is:

ilbtoppm somefile.iff >outputfilename.ppm

This is a bit clunky and a pain to run a hundred times for different filenames, so I knocked up a quick one-liner to convert all .iff files in a folder to .ppm

for f in *.iff; do ilbmtoppm "$f" >"${f%.*}.ppm"; done

As with most things, I’ve mainly written this for my benefit so I can refer to it in a few months/years when I forget what the hell I did.

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A few years ago I settled on using Linux Mint. It has a bad rap and isn’t the most customisable, but damn if it isn’t stable.

My true comfy distro is xubuntu, however as of 22.04 it’s installing Firefox as a snap. The problem with this is that I use a custom theme and mouse cursor theme, which snaps seem to be completely unaware of.

So, for coming up to 8 years I’m still sticking with Linux Mint. It’s not cutting edge and exciting, it has a (undeserved) reputation as a beginner OS, but it’s stable and doesn’t use bloody snaps.

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I recently got a Raspberry Pi 400. I’ve got Retropie on one microSD card and the official Raspberry Pi OS on another, but I wanted a “full fat” OS. My preferred Linux distro for lower powered systems is Xubuntu, but there is no pre-built image available, so you need to start with Ubuntu server (64bit) which is available in the Raspberry Pi imager.

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