Shutter, Take screen shots in style!

I found Shutter while messing with very simple window managers for Ubuntu. These window managers, unlike desktop environments such as unity or gnome, do not come with a screenshot utility already implemented.

So after a little search on Synaptic, I found Shutter.

While I usually look for the simplest software I can get to do any one task, I have to admit the Shutter program has a lot of useful features.

Here is a quote from an article about it's features:

"You can take screenshots of a specific area, a window, or your whole screen. With an addition to that you can apply different effects to it, draw on it to highlight points, and then use it as per your need. Shutter is free, open-source, and licensed under GPL v3. I am sure you will find this simple program interesting and helpful.

Shutter features in detail:

· Capture a specific area: you can choose any arbitrary region of your screen and take screen shot this help you to capture only those parts you really need. Shutter offers two different tools to do so in order to meet any user’s taste.

· Capture a window: You can choose the window you want to take screen shot of and Shutter will highlight the currently select window in an attractive and useful way. It is even possible to simple select a window from a list and capture it right away.

· Capture a menu or tool tip: Capturing menus or tool tips is very easy with Shutter. You select one of the options and a (user-defined) countdown starts. During this time you can open the desired menu or let a specific tool tip come up. Shutter will recognize and capture it. This is a real advanced feature.

· Capture a website: Choose the website opened in the browser and it can take the screen shot of the website."

-Tech Stroke Shutter Article

http://techstroke.com/shutter-ubuntu-1004910-advanced-screen-shot-program.html

As of my writing this article, the official website for Shutter, shutter-project.org was unreachable due to technical issues.

Here's a screenshot of Shutter in action:

If you are the one with blender and gimp installed on you version of Ubuntu Studio, then this is definitely for you.

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Openbox Rocks!

When I fist installed and ran Openbox years ago, I thought it was way to simple for me.

When you first start up Openbox, it's basically an ugly grey screen with nothing but a right click menu.

I now realize what it really is, the tray, forks, knives and napkins at an all you can eat Linux buffet.

Openbox is simple because it's the foundation for what you intend to do with your desktop.

After installing and running applications like wicd-gtk, tint2, feh, obmenu, pcmanfm, and grun it can be molded to be beautiful, functional, simple, and quicker than greased lightning. (and maybe gkrellm if you like what you see below.)

My personal set up starts with a file I had to create in the /home/user/.config/openbox/ folder. the file named is autostart, and it is very useful. (Replace user with your username, for me it would be /home/denny/.config/openbox/... also, .config is hidden, you may have to use control h to unhide it.)

I right clicked in that folder, and chose 'create new' and then 'blank file'.

After naming it autostart, I added a autostart template from the Official Openbox Wiki.

My autostart file looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
feh --bg-scale /home/denny/Pictures/wallpapers/starnight.jpg & tint2 & wicd-gtk & gkrellm

Here I am telling feh to set my background image, then i fire up tint2, then wicd-gtk (i use a wireless network) and then for my weather and email checking I use gkrellm.

Tint2 is a panel application. I chose it because it is simple and elegant. You could just as easily install xfce4-panel or lxpanel, both would work quite nicely.

Since I use regular old Ubuntu, and then hack the stuffing out of it once it's installed, i do have at my disposal the wireless panel app that comes with regular Ubuntu, but for some reason it doesn't want to show up on Tint2 unless I actually add tint2 to the /etc/xdg/autostart/ folder in desktop configuration file format, which I would rather not do.

So I instead use wicd-gtk, which has been exceptional on this machine.

Here is my screenshot:

There are a lot of other Openbox screenshots available here:
http://openbox.org/wiki/Openbox:Screenshots

You can see feh has changed the background image, tint2 is displaying my running apps, shutter is taking the screenshots, gkrellm is telling me whether I have email, what the weather is like, and how my processor is doing, and wicd-gtk is handling my wireless net connection.

One of the first things I do when installing Openbox is to run obmenu, and then I use obmenu to add obmenu as a menu option. That way you can change the menu through the menu option your created, very useful.

I also install grun and add it to the menu. Then I add pcmanfm to the menu, listed above in the menu options as home. with these few things you have a very easy way to get to and to do the rest of your modifications without having to fire up your terminal window to do so.

I top it off with some of my favorite cli apps like moc for my music player and htop in the "tools section", and I use terminator for my terminal emulator. These are all just suggestions, the fun part of Openbox is making it your own!

I hope after reading my little article you give openbox a try again... it can be quite rewarding, and make your machine run much faster.

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Terminator a first class terminal emulator

I am enough of a Linux geek to where I use the terminal emulator a lot. So many tasks can be accomplished faster and with less "clutter".

As much as I find Gnome-Terminal a fine app, there is definitely room for improvement.

I especially don't like how gnome-terminal uses the f10 key as one of it's hot keys, blocking use of the much used key in cli programs like Midnight Commander,  HTop and others. (CLI stands for Command Line Interface, for those of you who did not know.)

Besides gnome-terminal's weaknesses, I also find Terminator's ability to split the screen into two three or more panels inside the main screen of Terminator to be very useful.

It's great to be troubleshooting a problem with google using Links while chatting up the Ubuntu guys over at irc.freenode.org, channel #ubuntu for help using irssi, all on the same screen.

There is actually a lot more features than I have listed here.

Here are some screenshots of some of my usual setups with Terminator:

Well that's enough for me, here is what Chris Jones, Terminator's creator, has to say about his unique and useful software:

"Terminator - Multiple GNOME terminals in one window

Terminator  is  a program that allows users to set up flexible arrangements of GNOME terminals. It is aimed at those who normally arrange lots of  terminals  near  each  other,  but don't want to use a frame based window manager.

The  layout  can be modified by moving terminals with Drag and Drop.  To start dragging a terminal, click and hold on its titlebar.   Alternatively,  hold  down  Ctrl, click and hold the right mouse button.  Then, **Release Ctrl**. You can now drag the terminal to the point in the layout you would like it to be.   The  zone  where  the terminal would be inserted will be highlighted."

"The goal of this project is to produce a useful tool for arranging terminals.
It is inspired by programs such as gnome-multi-term, quadkonsole, etc. in that the main focus is arranging terminals in grids (tabs is the most common default method, which Terminator also supports).

Much of the behaviour of Terminator is based on GNOME Terminal, and we are adding more features from that as time goes by, but we also want to extend out in different directions with useful features for sysadmins and other users."

These quotes are from Terminator's man pages, and from http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator.

I think that if you use the terminal window enough, you will find Terminator a very valuable tool.

For more information, I suggest you go to Chris Jones's website, http://www.tenshu.net/.

Their is a Terminator button right on the top of the page.

If you are interested in installing it, in Ubuntu you can do so using the command sudo apt-get install terminator. You can also get it by searching for it in Synaptic or Ubuntu's new Software Center.

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Moonlight in Firefox or Chrome on Ubuntu

Moonlight is a Silverlight alternative available for Linux users from the fine people at Novell.

This How To is designed for use on Ubuntu 11.10 using either Firefox 9.0.1, or Chrome (Chromium) version 15.

First I installed libmono-wcf3.0-cil. If you use Synaptic or Ubuntu's Software Center, you can find this by either searching for mono or Moonlight.

You can also install this with apt-get by typing the command: sudo apt-get install libmono-wcf3.0-cil in your terminal window. (Control alt t, unless your using xfce.)

*** This section is for Firefox only ***

I installed a Firefox plugin called:

Disable Add-on Compatibility Checks 1.3
by Kris Maglione

Reinstates the extensions.checkCompatibility preference without respect to the current application version.

This is needed because technically the Moonlight plugin is not yet considered compatible with Firefox 9.0.1., as well as many other versions of Firefox.

I have never had a problem with Moonlight running in this fashion though.

Firefox will ask you if you trust these plugins. Say yes to continue, or this process won't work.

I have never had any problems with viruses or any other intrusions from these authors.

You can find "Disable Add-on Compatibility Checks 1.3" here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/checkcompatibility/?src=search

Once that is installed, then we want to install the Moonlight plugin.

*** This section is for both Firefox and Chrome ***

You can get Moonlight here: http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/

Again Firefox asks if you trust the author, which in this case is Novell, who is very trustworthy.

Chrome will display a warning on the bottom of the page. You must allow the download for this process to work.

Once this is accomplished you will need to restart Firefox. Chrome should not need a restart.

If you want to test your newly installed Moonlight plugin, I suggest using this page:

http://www.bubblemark.com/

I suggest you use this test: Silverlight 3.0 (CLR, CacheMode="BitmapCache")

The reason I suggest that particular test is that your new Moonlight plugin should now handle Silverlight 3.0 extensions with ease, so this is a decent test for our new plugin.

If you see the balls floating, you are the proud owner of a functioning Moonlight plugin.

I hope this has been useful to you, if you have any questions, please feel free to email me at dennygoot@gmail.com.

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Canonical's "Jumpstart"

I went to Ubuntu.com just to check out what's happening, and I was greeted with this:

Five days.
$9,000.
One fully-functioning cloud.

I started reading about it, and it sounds like a great way to get a service up and running on the order of a music store, facebook, twitter, or maybe something like sourceforge.

 I like that Canonical is working Ubuntu into a multi headed multi platformed system, not just for us computer geeks.

I also noted that Ubuntu has hit the 20 million mark for users. While I know that this is a drop in the bucket in comparison to Microsoft (I so wanted to call it Microshaft or something else not very flattering to MS, but...)

As a side note I have gravitated toward Xubuntu LTS releases for my customers. The stability of the LTS releases along with XFCE having a feel they are used to seems to be a win win.

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Must have console apps

I thought I would write about my favorite console apps.

Most of the apps I have chosen are installed for that occasion when x dies or something like that, and I am stranded in the console.

I have found it a good idea to install these apps before your computer has that painful disaster.

Midnight Commander (sudo apt-get install mc)

GNU Midnight Commander (mc) is a free cross-platform orthodox file manager and a clone of Norton Commander originally created by Miguel de Icaza.
Midnight Commander is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
(Thanks to Wikipedia for this data)

MC is sooo useful. If you are stranded in the console, you can fly around the hard drive's folder structure with ease. It makes a lot less work than using the console comands to navigate folder structure. (ls, cd, is so slow.)

Htop (sudo apt-get install htop)

This is htop, an interactive process viewer for Linux. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses. Tested with Linux 2.4 and 2.6.

Although this is part of my tool kit for fixing things in console, I find myself using htop when x is running fine, but some app I ran has locked up. It runs faster than the other gui process viewers, and is easy to hunt down and kill that rogue app. (Which always seems to be a Wine app.)

IRSSI (sudo apt-get install irssi)

Irssi is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client. It is a text-based client as it lacks a graphical user interface (gui) such as XChat, Chatzilla and others. It was written from scratch using the C programming language, and was designed to run on Unix-like operating systems. It has been ported to the Windows platform using Cygwin, and for the Macintosh under the name MacIrssi.

This is your life line. If you are stuck in console, you can still reach the helpful hands at irc.freenode.org, channel #ubuntu.

If you don't have an account at irc.freenode.org, that's fine, the server will just give you a name like Guest12345.

To connect with IRSSI, type /connect irc.freenode.org.

If you have an account with freenode.org, and you want to use it, you will first need to change your nick with /nick (yournick).

My nick is hylian, so for me it wold be /nick hylian

Then you will have to supply identification to nickserv.

You do that by typing /msg nickserv identify (your password)

Once you are either using a Guest account or your own freenode.org account, you then need to join a channel.

To do this type /join #ubuntu

Always be polite, and always just ask your question. (Don't ask them if it's ok to ask them a question)

Links (sudo apt-get install links)

Links 2  is  a  text mode WWW browser with ncurses interface, supporting colors, correct table rendering, background  downloading,  menu  driven configuration interface and slim code.

Frames  are  supported.  You can have different file formats associated with external viewers. mailto: and telnet: are supported  via  external clients.

Links 2 can handle local (file://) or remote (http:// or ftp://) URLs.
(modified a little from man links)

Just for clarity, this is the non x version. They make a www browser called X Links 2, also a very good browser.

Links is another very usefull tool. If you are stranded in the console, you can still research your problem via google.com, duckduckgo.com, etc..

The next section of console apps are not related to computer repair, but are just apps I enjoy.


MOC (sudo apt-get install moc) (runs with the mocp command, not moc.)

MOC (music on console) is a console audio player for LINUX/UNIX designed to be powerful and easy to use.

You just need to select a file from some directory using the menu similar to Midnight Commander, and MOC will start playing all files in this directory beginning from the chosen file. There is no need to create play lists like in other players.

If you want to combine some files from one or few directories on one play list, you can do this. The play list will be remembered between runs or you can save it as an m3u file to load it whenever you want.

Need the console where MOC is running for more important things? Need to close the X terminal emulator? You don't have to stop playing - just press q and the interface will be detached leaving the server running.

You can attach it later, or you can attach one interface in the console, and another in the X terminal emulator, no need to switch just to play another file.

MOC plays smoothly, regardless of system or I/O load because it uses the output buffer in a separate thread. It doesn't cause gaps between files, because the next file to be played is precached while playing the current file.

Internet stream (Icecast, Shoutcast) are supported.

What I like most about moc is that i can set it, press q, and it will continue to play without terminal being open or having an interface. To make changes like turning MOC off or changing the song, volume, etc.. you just open the terminal and type mocp again. Capital Q shuts it off.

Mplayer (sudo apt-get install mplayer) (May need extra gstreamer codecs for some audio and video types)


MPlayer is a movie player which runs on many systems (see the documentation). It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5, WMV and even H.264 movies.

Another great feature of MPlayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, DirectFB, but you can use GGI, SDL (and this way all their drivers), VESA (on every VESA compatible card, even without X11!) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and ATI), too! Most of them support software or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen. MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the Siemens DVB, DXR2 and DXR3/Hollywood+.

MPlayer has an onscreen display (OSD) for status information, nice big antialiased shaded subtitles and visual feedback for keyboard controls. European/ISO 8859-1,2 (Hungarian, English, Czech, etc), Cyrillic and Korean fonts are supported along with 12 subtitle formats (MicroDVD, SubRip, OGM, SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub, PJS and our own: MPsub). DVD subtitles (SPU streams, VOBsub and Closed Captions) are supported as well.

I use mplayer for playing ShoutCast audio streams (as shown in the screenshot) and for playing the music in .flv music video files in the console, which can be accomplished with mplayer --novideo (filename).

Cowsay (sudo apt-get install cowsay)

Cowsay is entirely useless, and pretty fun.

If you type cowsay Hello World!  you will get a cow saying "Hello World!".

There are actually a lot of commands for cowsay, changing everything from the kind of cow you get, to how the eyes look, and even replacing the cow with things like Tux the Linux mascot, or Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, just to name a few.


There is also a cowthink app that will act like cowsay but give the cow a cartoony thought bubble.


I used cowsay to add a little shameless Denny's Homeworld plug, as seen here:

(I added the apostrophe afterwards)

Does it have a use? Not really, unless your very creative. Maybe a command that uses fortune with cowsay to display useful hints and tips on how to use your newly programmed console app?

BSD-Games (sudo apt-get install bsdgames)

BSD Games is a collection of the classic text based games distributed with some BSDs like FreeBSD and NetBSD.
The included games are, alphabetically:

• adventure - an exploration game
• arithmetic - quiz on simple arithmetic
• atc - air traffic controller game
• backgammon - the game of backgammon
• banner - print large banner on printer
• battlestar - a tropical adventure game
• bcd - reformat input as punch cards, paper tape or morse code
• boggle - word search game
• caesar - decrypt caesar cyphers
• canfield - the solitaire card game canfield
• cfscores - show scores for canfield
• cribbage - the card game cribbage
• fish - play Go Fish
• gomoku - game of 5 in a row
• hangman - Computer version of the game hangman
• hunt - a multi-player multi-terminal game
• huntd - hunt daemon, back-end for hunt game
• mille - play Mille Bornes
• monop - Monopoly game
• morse - reformat input as punch cards, paper tape or morse code
• number - convert Arabic numerals to English
• phantasia - an interterminal fantasy game
• pom - display the phase of the moon
• ppt - reformat input as punch cards, paper tape or morse code
• primes - generate primes
• quiz - random knowledge tests
• rain - animated raindrops display
• random - random lines from a file or random numbers
• robots - fight off villainous robots
• rot13 - rot13 encrypt/decrypt
• sail - multi-user wooden ships and iron men
• snake - display chase game
• teachgammon - learn to play backgammon
• tetris-bsd - the game of tetris
• trek - trekkie game
• wargames - shall we play a game?
• worm - Play the growing worm game
• worms - animate worms on a display terminal
• wtf - translates acronyms for you
• wump - hunt the wumpus in an underground cave 

Personally I only use this to play Boggle. Hangman is kind of fun too, and yes, I have even played go-fish.

I have to admit this is one of the strangest collections of "games" I have ever seen.

How generating primes or ascii rain drops constitutes a game, I will never know.


Above all, my most used console app is apt-get. I made mention of the proper codes to install these. Apt-get is so usefull for installing Ubuntu apps, whether they be graphical or not.

It's also the fastest way, if you know the name of the repository it installs from, to install any app on Ubuntu.

I hope these apps bring you help and enjoyment.

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Watchtower Library under Ubuntu 11.10

*** Added extra info as of Nov 6th, 2011 ***

*** Added extra info as of Nov 9th, 2011 ***

*** Added extra info as of Nov 10th, 2011 ***

I have had several comments mailed to me about the Watchtower Library not functioning in Ubuntu 11.10.

I've been able to get it to work by using the desktop config file created during install of the library. (The file with the Watchtower Library icon on it, on the desktop.)

I hid the file in my home folder to keep the icon out of the way, so I did not delete the file on accident, so this is optional.

If you are interested in this option, I did it by using a hidden folder. You can do this by right clicking in your home folder, choosing add folder, and when naming it add a period before the name, i.e. .hidden, is a hidden folder named hidden.

You can see the folder again by holding control and typing h.

Run the library using the icon, and then I suggest while the library is running you go to the bar on the left, right click the library icon, and choose "keep in launcher".

again this is optional, but if you use the library as much as I do, it will pay off in spades later.

If the icon does not launch, then right click it, choose properties, and then click  on the permissions tab,which will be on the top left of the properties window you just opened.

Then if the "Allow executing the file as a program" is not checked, then check it.

Press close, and try to run the library through the desktop config file again.

If you disposed of the file, then I have a copy of mine available here:
Denny's Linux Box File Storage

If your browser does not offer to download the file, then you can choose file, and then save page as, or ctrl s in most cases. make sure to save the page as "Watchtower Library 2010 - English.desktop"

If you have to use my file, you will have to make a small change.

This file is designed around my user name, denny.

If your user name is different, and most likely it is, then you will have to edit the file. you can do this by right clicking the file and choosing properties.

in the 'command:' box, it will say this:

env WINEPREFIX="/home/denny/.wine" wine C:\\Program\ Files\\Watchtower\\Watchtower\ Library\ 2010\\E\\WTLibrary.exe

if your user name is peter, for instance, then you will have to change the line to read:

env WINEPREFIX="/home/peter/.wine" wine C:\\Program\ Files\\Watchtower\\Watchtower\ Library\ 2010\\E\\WTLibrary.exe 

This is the extent of my knowledge currently, since I have not had this problem personally. If anyone gets this error, and can get me the error reports from wine, I may be able to continue helping you.

Please feel free to comment here or e-mail me at dennygoot@gmail.com.

Added Nov 6th, 2011. 

I wanted to mention that one of the causes of the library not functioning is a problem with wine not recognizing where the dll's for the library are.

This doesn't happen all the time, and didn't happen to me on my install, so I assumed that the old problem no longer existed. 

Thanks to a brother named Andrew that wrote me about this very same problem, I am posting my fix here.

Copy the dll's from the /home/denny/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Watchtower/MEPS Platform 2.3/ folder to the /home/denny/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/ folder.

You may need a complete reboot for this problem to be solved. I also have added these same dll's to the /home/denny/.wine/drive_c/windows/system/ folder. (This should not be neccessary, I am just always taking extra steps just to make sure problems don't arise.)

Keep in mind once again my username denny should be replaced with your username. (i.e. paul, would be /home/paul/.wine/drive_c/etc... )

Also keep in mind that the wine folder is hidden (hence the .wine, instead of wine folder name), which means you might have to hold control and type h to see the wine folder.

Again, if there is any problems with this work around please email me at dennygoot@gmail.com.

Added Nov 9th, 2011

Dave, an Ubuntu user from the Hartlepool South congregation in N.E. England  has just succeeded in installing the Watchtower library on Ubuntu 11.10 (after some difficulty). 

Thanks to Dave, here are some tips if you still don't have the library running, in Dave's own words:

Here's what DID NOT work:

1. Open terminal, type sudo apt-get install wine1.3 (neither did wine1.2) Watchtower library installed but would not run. Sadly, swapping dlls around did not help as per Andrew's suggestion.

2. Using Synaptic Package Manager to install Wine.

So here's what I did - I completely removed every last vestige of Wine from my PC.

1. Firstly I used Synaptic to un-install Wine but this did not remove it completely.

2. So using the terminal I entered sudo apt-get purge wine1.3

3. Then I sudo apt-get purge wine1.2

4. Then sudo apt-get autoremove to get rid of all other Wine-related programs.

5. Then I went to http://www.winehq.org/download/ubuntu and followed the instructions to the letter.

Following "I completely removed every last vestige of Wine from my PC." I should have added that I deleted the hidden folder .Wine in my home folder.

Also, I used the Alternative Command Line Instructions for installing Wine.

I now have the Watchtower library up and running just fine.

Best regards,

Dave

Added Nov 10th, 2011:

A brother in my kingdom hall had this very same problem, and this fix mentioned at wine hq solved it.

In terminal (hold control, alt, and press t) i typed this in:
rm ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/winsxs/manifests/*.vc90.*_deadbeef.manifest

After running that command, type exit in the terminal, and try running the library again.

As a side note, I worked out this command on my machine, it will copy the dll's over for you automatically:

cp /home/*/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Watchtower/MEPS\ Platform\ 2.3/*.dll /home/*/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/

It worked for my brother, perhaps this is your issue too.

Thank you Andrew and Dave for helping me and others to solve this problem!

-Denny :)

This is how my set up looks like after my work around:

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