One of the most common questions I receive as an editor comes by way of authors asking about the best way to take screenshots for use within their books. This is a particular challenge for our open source books, because it’s not uncommon for screenshots to be taken of various applications running on both Windows and Linux.
The solution I’ve long embraced has been the Gimp, which runs on all manner of platforms, Windows and Linux included. Once installed, just navigate to File > Acquire > Screenshot and choose to grab the entire screen or just a specific window. Works like a charm.
Aug 15, 05:55 am
An alternative method is to install the OS you’re writing about, or using as a platform, into a virtual machine like QEMU
This has two advantages:
1) If the OS crashes then you won’t lose your work; you just have to reset the virtual machine
2) You don’t get the annoying GIMP taskbar button on your screenshots, which you’ll probably end-up cloning out later on. Of course, you still use The GIMP to catch screenshots, but only catch the window of the VM.