I was wondering if there was a way in Linux to take a screen shot like in Windows?

In Windows I can hit "Print Screen" to place the entire screen on the clipboard as an image and "ALT - Print Screen" to take the screen shot of the current window in focus.

I would like to do the same with Linux.

in Graphics under both Gnome and KDE I think there is a screen capture program installed by default

If you have the ImageMagick package installed you can type:
import -window root filename.filext
...where filename is what you want the file to be called and filext the common extension for the file type you want (.jpg for JPEGs, etc).

The JPEG compression is horrible though so I usually capture it to a .tiff and then use the Gimp to convert to PNG or JPEG.

hw

i don't know which desktop environment you use, but in kde you can actually use alt+printscreen and printscreen to take screenshots. after doing alt+printscreen or a printscreen, for example, open up kpaint and in the file menubar choose Edit > Paste Image.

a word of note though, for me printscreen actually sucks. using the above method works, but for some reason on printscreen the windows decorations will disappear until you relogin. alt+printscreen works fine though. but for full desktop screenshots, it's better to use either the gkrellm shoot plugin or some other screenshot app like ksnapshot. but alt+printscreen and printscreen works in kde. not sure about gnome.

here's a screenshot of kpaint with a screenshot of konqueror using alt+printscreen. it's big and uncompressed i think (140 KB).

Clicky clicky

edit: forgot to mention, you may have to configure your keyboard shortcuts in kde to use the printscreen key for desktop screenshot. i think alt+printscreen is a default key combo for a windows screenshot.

The GIMP also does screenshots, plus you can tweak it.

Steve

ksnapshot in kde
gimp in gnome

Try this

K menu, or start thingy, then Multimedia then Graphics then Ksnapshot.

That help?