If you are thinking we have some fancy screen capture program that we use to add screenshots to Tux articles, think again. There are actually quite a few capture programs included with most Linux distributions. One such program is Ksnapshot which is part of the KDE distribution itself.

Just like other programs, KSnapshot can be started from the menus (it appears in Utilities->Desktop on SUSE) or the Run Box by typing Alt-F2 and then entering ksnapshot as the command. When started, it displays a small window that looks like:

The preview window in the upper left is a snapshot of your current desktop before KSnapshot appeared.

The Save As button brings up the standard KDE file save dialog. Print brings up the standard KDE print dialog. The New Snapshot button causes KSnapshot to update the snapshot.

The next block of information allows you to modify what is captured and when it is captured. Capture mode offers three choices: Full Screen, Window Under Cursor and Region. The first two choices should be rather obvious. Region is what you might expect--you use the mouse to specify a region to be captured. When the mouse cursor changes to a cross, move to one corner of the desired region, press and hold the left mouse button and drag the mouse to the opposite corner. When you release the button a new snapshot is taken of the outlined region.

The Snapshot delay is useful if you need to use the mouse to get things set up before the snapshot. For example, you might want to access a pull-down window. Select a time that allows you to get everything set up before the capture takes place.

If you have selected the Window Under Cursor capture mode, you will have the option of including the window decorations. This option is checked by default. If you turn it off, only the contents of the window will be displayed without the border information that is supplied by the window manager.