Taking Screenshots in Gnome
 

I have the Print Screen key on my keyboard configured so that it takes a screen shot when I press the key.

However, I am unable to take a screen shot if I have clicked the Applications menu in the Gnome desktop environment.

I want to take a screen shot of the Applications menu when it is "pulled down", but the print screen key does nothing whilst the Applications menu is pulled down waiting for a response.


Has anybody actually tried to do this before? Is it a bug in Gnome? or is it just my computer? Is there a solution that will make Print Screen work when the Applications menu is pulled down?

Regards,
Greenie

I think its a bug in GNOME. I have seen this problem mentioned somewhere else before. GNOME has its own app for taking screenshots. Its location in the GNOME menu varies between distros so I can't tell you exactly how to locate it.

I don't know if this will be of any help, but it's worth a shot.

When you need to find a way to break the kyboard away from a game or such, and give control back to the desktop before you can use Gnome or KDE's screenshot utilities, you can nearly always get back to one of the virtual terminals.

Pressing CTRL+ALT+F1 will switch from your desktop to the text based login of the first virtual terminal.

Other virtual terminals are accessible by substituting F1 with F2-F6, and you can get back to your desktop by switching to the seventh virtual terminal CTRL+ALT+F7, which happens to be running your X session.

Now that you can get back to the command line, you are now able to take a screenshot using one of the many ImageMagick tools you find installed on your system by default.

Try:

chvt 7;sleep 10;import -display :0.0 -window root image.png

This switches to the virtual terminal running X (chvt 7), waits ten seconds, then uses ImageMagick's import command to dump the contents of the screen to image.png. Sorted!

I use Ksnapshot, even on my Ubuntu/Gnome machines, because I find it more for my puposes than the Gnome screenshot utility. It's in the repos.

When I want to do what you want, I set Ksnapshot to take a new screenshot after x number of seconds, then open up whatever menu or pop-up I want and keep them open until the timer goes off.

Back in my Windows days, I used to use PRT-SCR (active window) and CRTL-PRT-SCREEN (entire screen) for screenshots. PRT-SCREEN would close any menus or popups when I pressed it, but CTRL-PRT-SCREEN did not.