Title photo
frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Tue, 11 Oct 2016

I am trying Shutter as my GNOME screenshot program

Since the GNOME screenshot program is very broken, at least in my installation of GNOME, I decided to try Shutter, the Linux screenshot program written in Perl and seemingly aimed at GNOME users.

Shutter has a lot of options, and so far I can get it to work.

Going back to the beginning, why is the GNOME screenshot program broken in my GNOME installation? I have no idea.

When I hit the print-screen key, nothing at all happens. If I bind it to alt-p, I get the "shutter" sound, and a PNGJPG image appears in my Photos folder. Even if I go into gconf settings to modify just about everything, calling the screenshot program from the keyboard produces the same resultwon't allow me to change the target directory.

But if I hit the super key (or mouse into the hot corner), then search for Screenshot and run it, I get the full GNOME Screenshot window to open, and it has all of my configuration options (JPG instead of PNG, choose my own directory/folder). Why can't I make this work from the keyboard -- from print-screen or any other keyboard shortcut?

I've dwelled on GNOME Screenshot enough. Now I'm going to see if Shutter can do what I need. Or I can just use Xfce, where the screenshot program works like it's supposed to -- with the print-screen key. Why is this so hard, GNOME people?

Update: After using Shutter once (I have it bound to alt-P), the icon sits in my upper panel. I can then take a screenshot by clicking the icon. Easy.

Speaking of panels in the panel-less GNOME (where not having things appears to be a "feature"), I do have a panel in the form of the TopIcons, Places Status Indicator and Applications Menu extensions. And yes, it is not a good thing that what many consider core funtionality can only be implemented through Extensions that aren't part of the GNOME 3 core.

More GNOME Extensions: I just added Frippery Panel Favorites to make the upper panel on my GNOME 3 desktop even more GNOME 2-like.