Fedora 18 Review

Fedora 18 was released today so I thought I would take a quick look at it and share my thoughts.

Pear Linux 6.1 Video Review

With the release of Pear Linux 6.1 today, I thought I would give it a try and put together a quick video review. Let me know if this is something you find worthwhile and I may do more.

How to Take Screenshots of the Login Screen in Ubuntu 12.10

Last month when I posted about installing multiple desktops environments within Ubuntu, I found myself needing to take a screenshot of the login screen. It wasn't immediately obvious how this could be done but after a bit of fiddling around I managed to find a good solution that I thought I would share. First off, you will need to make sure imagemagick is installed. Open the terminal and type:

• sudo apt-get install imagemagick

After it installs we are going to create a script to take the screenshot for us. I like to keep my scripts in a folder called “Scripts” within my home directory but you can create it anywhere you like. In the terminal type:

• sudo nano screenshot.sh

This will open nano, a simple terminal based text editor. On the first line type:

• chvt 7; sleep 5s; DISPLAY=:0 XAUTHORITY=/var/run/lightdm/root/:0 xwd -root -out ~/temp.xwd; convert ~/temp.xwd ~/screenshot.png; rm ~/temp.xwd

This script will exit the console mode, wait for five seconds (you can change this to anything you like), capture the screen into a file called temp.xwd and finally convert it to a png. Now type ctrl-x to save the script. In order to run it however, we will need to make it executable, so type:

• sudo chmod +x screenshot.sh

Now log out of your session and once you are back to the login screen type ctrl-alt-1 to open the console mode. You will have to login with your username and password, and then navigate to the folder where the script is located and type:

• sudo ./screenshot.sh

Enter your password and the script will boot you back into lightdm and after five seconds it will capture the screen. To see the image log back in to ubuntu and navigate to your home folder. There you should find a new file called screenshot.png

Removing Unsupported Game Entries from Steam Beta

I’ve been playing around with steam beta for linux a bit this week and I am super excited to see this amazing project working so well in Ubuntu. After adding some games I purchased from the Indie Humble Bundle I noticed a little bug that I thought I would touch on. When you view your list of “Linux Games”, Steam will show games that are compatible with linux but unfortunately not all of them are officially supported yet. The easiest way to check if the installation will work is to click the install button and on the window that pops up, check if the disk space required information is visible. If it is blank, like the screenshot below, it will likely not install properly.

If you have accidently installed an unsupported game, steam will throw an “invalid app config“ error when you try to run it. To get rid of the application entry do the following. Make sure steam is closed then open a terminal and navigate to ~/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps/common .Then type the following:

• rmdir {name of game}

in my case it was:

• rmdir snapshot

This will remove the directory. Next navigate to ~/.local/share/Steam/config/ and type:

• sudo nano config.vdf

This will bring up the text editor. Find the section called “apps” and locate the block that references the game you wish to remove. It will start with a number code followed by an open and closed curly brace. Check the “Installdir” section for clues to which entry is which. Write down the number code before continuing. Delete the entire entry, including the number code, the open and closed curly braces and everything in between them. In my case I deleted:

"204220"
{
    "installdir" "~/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps/common/snapshot"
    "HasAllLocalContent" "1"
    “UpToDate" "1"
}

Press ctrl+x to save and then navigate back to ~/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps/ Now type:

• rm appmanifest_{number code}.acf

in my case it was:

• rm appmanifest_204220.acf

Now start up steam and it will no longer think you have the game installed.