Shutter is the best screen capture utility for Linux. Period.
So I was dismayed to find that there is no package to just install it under openSUSE. One post on their site suggest that openSUSE didn’t want to include it because it’s essentially a bunch of scripts that leverage Perl libraries. That doesn’t seem like a real reason.
You can get it working if you’re willing to go through the pain. Download the source tarball from the Shutter site. Extract the contents and put them in /usr/local/shutter.
Fire up your terminal and run
/usr/local/shutter/bin/shutter
It will, of course, not run. Now you’re ready to go through the installation nightmare that even the developer refers to as “brutal” in openSUSE.
Install all the gnome, test, and gtk related perl packages. Even if you get all of these on the first go, you’ll need to get a lot of additional packages from cpan.org that are apparently completely unavailable in openSUSE. You should be able to get Shutter to the point where it’s asking for “Gnome2/GConf.pm” before you should stop looking for installable perl packages. At that point I had to download:
- Gnome2::GConf
- Gtk2::ImageView
- Gnome2::Wnck
- Goo::Canvas
- HTTP::Server::Simple
- HTTP::Response::Encoding
- X11::Protocol
- WWW::Mechanize
After extracting these, run the following commands one at a time:
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
sudo make install
I ran into a couple other dependency issues which were satisfied by standard packages. Keep in mind that you need the development devel packages for the items it specifies, not just the libraries themselves. I also ignored warnings about having the wrong version of LWP.
In the end I was stopped by a bug that was saying it couldn’t connect to X11:
Connection to server failed -- (version 11.0)
No protocol specified
I found a forum post that spoke to this issue saying you need to enter xhost + before you run it, which deactivates X11’s security rules and allows Shutter to open in the display. I don’t yet understand why this is necessary. But after doing that, it ran. Screenshots work, but the ultra-nifty web snapshot feature didn’t seem to- no doubt there are other issues I need to figure out.
In the end, I’m glad it is partially working, but I find myself annoyed that a) Shutter isn’t included in openSUSE or b) that the openSUSE team could have at least provided packages for some of these things. At some point I hope I can learn to package and can offer an rpm of this.
Wow, this was super-helpful. I got it working on OpenSuSE 11.1 with KDE 4.2.4. I’m a bit of a Linux newbie and I would never have figured this out without your help! But your instructions were pretty clear and now it’s working. It’s a good screenshot capture tool.
I’m glad I could help, Robin. I’ll let you know if I figure out the web page capture part.
It’s amazing but also dreadful. I dare not to move forward. I hate resolving dependencies.
That’s true- this was probably the most effort I have put into a small app. Having used it previously I still want to use it, but openSUSE doesn’t work well with it.
Another app you can look at if you want to capture web pages or parts of web pages is the new ‘Talon’ Firefox plugin from Aviary at http://aviary.com/install/talon
It works very well, you can create an account with them and save directly to your account or you can just save to your desktop- it’s very nice.