I want to capture the runlevel 3 login screen as an image.

The /dev/vcs device won't suffice because that device provides only a sloppy character dump and not a true image capture.

Xnest doesn't work on either of my boxes (I have no idea why---all I get is a black screen with one-third of a mouse pointer) and vnc is for X only. I thought possibly rlogin might work, but I do not want to login from a command line---I want to see the actual console login screen and then grab an image snapshot.

I've searched high and low for a simple console-based screen capture program with some kind of hotkey. I'm struggling to believe nothing like this exists in the 'nix world because basic MS-DOS screen capture programs existed almost 20 years ago.

I'm probably missing the big picture here, but all I want to do is open a Konsole (I use KDE), somehow toggle to one of the login consoles, and use KSnapshot to grab the image. How can I view a tty console from within X/Konsole? I do have two boxes connected to each other if that helps.

you can't view a tty within X

if you use framebuffer in console, try fbgrab...
if you use standard vga, you're sol afaik

This has become a sore spot for me. I need to grab screen shots---that's what technical writers do!

I more or less solved this immediate issue by temporarily enabling telnet and logging in remotely via a shell window. Then with KSnapshot I was able to grab the login message screen as an image and crop.

But there are other console-based screen grabs I need to capture: boot screens, init scripts, the Slackware setup, etc. The only way I can think of capturing all of that is with something like VMWare, which I do not possess and am not interested in buying, even if I had the hardware to support that kind of thing, which I don't. That no easy console screen capture utility exists is discouraging. I could do that kind of thing in DOS back in the 80s.

I glanced at fbgrab, but that won't work on a box that doesn't support framebuffers. I'd also have to learn how to compile and create a Slack package before installing and right now I'm simply weary of having to learn 10 different skills just to move one inch forward. As my best friend often said about computers, these things aren't ready for prime time and after 20+ years of using computers myself I have no reason to disagree.

Use qemu which is free