Some insight on whats going wrong [Not a coding problem, but concept problem]
 

Hello All,

Well being from non-CSE background does hamper me many times and here it is again.

I am simply trying to write a script, which will take screenshots of the websites gives as input parameter to it.

Well the algorithm is simple:
1. Open site on your browser
2. Take a screenshot
3. Save the screenshot

Now I tried this on my local Ubuntu (running using VMWare) and here is what i tried:

and it gives me a screenshot of the screen. (I open up my browse while it was in sleep for 10 seconds).

Now I wanted this to be reproduced on my VPS (Debian, text only with no monitor/screen). So i went and tried, xwd which was not installed on by default.

So I installed the xbase-clients package. But now when I try to run xwd, it says :

Now I am unable to understand what's wrong. I typed

and it hung my shell.

Can someone kindly guide me through this? Is it really not possible to do this on my VPS, which I was doing with ease on my Ubuntu box.

Regards,
Imoracle

Prob didn't hang the shell. did it maybe start X in that shell (spit out a bunch of garbage and then apear unresponsive?) how do you plan on opening the web browser and going to another page when there is no monitor?

yeah here is where the problem comes......I prepared script on my local ubuntu box and then tried to move to my VPS. But now I suddenly realize that i dont have a monitor to take a screenshot from.

I am not sure how can I achieve this or how do others achieve this.

Any pointers will be highly appreciated.

Imoracle

Well I'd still like to help but I don't realy understand what your doing here. You are trying to take a screenshot of what a web page looks like on a headless computer. why?

Actually I am making a service where people will submit there blog url's and I will show them to the world. But instead of simply showing the blog name, post title and post snippet I also want to have a snapshot of the post page.

Now problem is: User comes and submit his blog/site etc etc. How do I take snapshot of his submitted article. Hence I thought of the above steps to achieve this, which seemed to be working fine on my local ubuntu but not on my VPS (Debian).

I have only shell access to my VPS.

So this is the problem in short. Another problem is that I simply don't want to have the thumbnails by using some third party tool etc, in the process I also want to learn the methodology used by some sites to generate them.

Regards,
Imoracle

A better alternative would be to fetch the contents with a 'wget' script. Now all you need to find is a tool to render the html to an image file like png.