Gnome-Screenshot & Beryl Screenshot Plugin

Taking screenshots in the Gnome desktop environment is as simple as pressing [Print Screen] key. If like me you use a Mac Mini USB keyboard (which doesn’t have such a key) you could mess around with keyboard mapping.

Alternatively within Gnome there is a screenshot app called “gnome-screenshot” found in Application > Accessories > Take Screenshot. I’ve placed a copy of this app on the lower panel (the camera icon) and assigned a 10 second delay to the launch properties. This gives me time to prepare for taking screenshots, especially useful for taking a shot of the 3D cube within Beryl.

If you use the XGL/Beryl environment there is a neat screenshot plugin which allows you to take a screenshot of a specific area through the combination of pressing the [Super] key & left clicking your mouse whilst high-lighting the area. You may need to edit the plugin properties within the Beryl Setting Manager to set your desired directory path such as /home/username/Desktop.

Here is an example of the selected area (minus mouse cursor) I choose to take a screenshot of within the Beryl environment.

After releasing the [Super] key and mouse button the screenshot of the area you selected should now be automatically saved in the directory you assigned.

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

Days before the official release of Edgy Eft, Mark Shuttleworth has recently announced the name of the next development version of the Ubuntu distro family.

“With the final release of Ubuntu 6.10 approaching, and apparently set
to be spot on schedule October 26th, we’re starting to look beyond
it to Ubuntu 7.04, scheduled for release on 19 April 2007.

In the next cycle we’ll expand on the brand new infrastructure that has
landed in Edgy as well as branching out in some exciting new directions.
This combination of courage and restlessness is also found in a young deer
that sets out to explore a world that is new and exciting – seeing the
world through eyes unprejudiced by what has gone before.

In that spirit, the release will be be code named “The Feisty Fawn”.

The main themes for feature development in this release will be
improvements to hardware support in the laptop, desktop and high-end
server market, and aggressive adoption of emerging desktop technologies.
Ubuntu’s Feisty release will put the spotlight on multimedia enablement
and desktop effects. We expect this to be a very gratifying release for
both users and developers.”

Judging by the specifications of next months development meeting, more emphasis seems to be placed on improving assistive technology & accessibility features such as; braille device support, screen magnification, and speech synthesis.

I have a friend, whom I’ve known for over 20 years (since we were knee high to grasshoppers), who will be very appreciative of such features. Hopefully the developers will get it right and liaise with people affected by sensory deprivation and make significant improvements of accessibility, which are surprisingly still very primitive within Linux & Open Source.