Screenshot

The term Screenshot usually describes an image taken of a user's graphical environment, or desktop. A screenshot can be either of the entire desktop with everything on it, or it can be of just a single window open. It is also possible to get "screenshots" of non-graphical output, such things as a computer's POST messages and/or BIOS interface can be grabbed.

Tips

There are many ways to take a screenshot. Some IDEs make it very easy.

Even if there are no pre-established mechanisms, it's quite simple with the 'import' utility that is part of the ImageMagick collection that ships on most or all distros.

A simple command:

import -window root picname.ext

will suffice -- where you supply the ext filename extension. The choice of extension determines which format the image is saved in. ".png" is a good choice. To just grab a single client window, something like

import -frame picname.ext

will do. To use the mouse to choose which window to capture, use the command:

import picname.ext.

The cursor will change to a '+'. You can then click on the window which has the image you want to capture.

There are many options -- see the import manual for full details. One particularly helpful one is "-pause n".

GNOME 2.4 and above has a new dialog to allow you to create screenshots extremely easily. Just press the 'Print Scrn' button on your keyboard and a nice dialog will pop up asking you where to save and which file format you'd like it in.

For something a little more convenient, you can write a little scriptlet that will be portable across window managers, timestamp the file, save it to a particular directory, and display it for your inspection.

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How do you take a screen shot in Linux?

How to do that ?

• often it's press print screen button
• then, if you are running KDE run ksnapshot