Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Replacing the default screen shot utility on ubuntu with shutter

Shutter, according to its website is a feature full screen shot program. As a tech blogger experimenting with GNU/Linux and its derivatives, it offers me a number of handy features. In fact, I have replaced it as my default screen shot tool. When I press Print Screen on my keyboard,shutter pops up and does a nice job.

Installation.

The shutter website hosts a step by step installation tutorial for graphical installation on Ubuntu. If you are oriented towards command line, follow these steps

1) Import the GPG key
$ sudo wget -q http://shutter-project.org/shutter-ppa.key -O- | sudo apt-key add -
2) Add the PPA repository--- to /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/shutter/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

( Replace jaunty with your version of ubuntu)

3) Install shutter
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install shutter

Features

Shutter offers lot of features for a blogger. Some of them are,
  • take a screen shot of your complete desktop, a rectangular area or capture a website
  • take screen shot directly or with a specified delay time
  • save the screen shots to a specified directory and name them in a convenient way (using special wild-cards)
  • Shutter is fully integrated into the Gnome Desktop (TrayIcon etc.)
  • generate thumbnails directly when you are taking a screenshot and set a size level in %
  • Shutter session collection
    • keep track of all screenshots during session
    • copy screeners to clipboard
    • print screenshots
    • delete screenshots
    • rename your file
  • upload your files directly to Image-Hosters (e.g. http://ubuntu-pics.de), retrieve all the needed links and share them with others
  • edit your screenshots directly using the embedded drawing tool

Making shutter the default screen shot tool on Ubuntu.
Assuming that you are using Genome desktop on ubuntu, you can set Print Screen and Alt-Print Screen can be
configured to launch shutter as below.
a) Open shutter
b) Select Edit->preferences from the menu
c) Click on behavior tab . See the screen shot below.




d) Enable Gnome Key binding by ticking the check boxes.

1 comment:

IBM Laptop AC Adapter said...

I have only seen Shutter on one occasion, but it seemed to suit the user appropriately. It took beautiful and clear screen shots of an MMO RPG game. I have come to notice that screen shots are a great thing to have for any reason, not necessarily video games. Thanks for the info and i definitely recommend Shutter to others.