grabw is a bash script that allows you to

1. Take a screenshot of a window by X window ID
2. Take a screenshot of a window the user first has to click, using xwininfo
3. The above two with or without asking for a filename using Zenity’s file selection dialogue window

Combine this with awesome’s ability to spawn processes on the fly and pass parameters (such as window IDs, *hint hint*) this is one feature I’m glad to have back

grabw 0.2 has been released into public domain, you can find it on my projects page.

I’ve been a Gentoo user since forever, and for some time I’ve been using awesome for a window manager instead of the desktop environments Gnome or KDE. One thing I never got around to change was the wallpaper. My terminals are pseudo-transparent, and I never disliked the default ‘awesome’ wallpaper. @ZackLeonhart‘s bitching and moaning changed that.

Turns out that aside from editing the system-wide theme script, by default located in /usr/share/awesome/themes/* (which I consider to be a BadThink™), there is no straight forward way of doing it nicely in the Gentoo provided default setup. So here’s what you do.

1. Create yourself a lua.rc in ${HOME}/.config/awesome
$ cp /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua ~/.config/awesome
2. Recursively copy all themes from the system-wide dirs to your local configdir.
   $ cp -rvf /usr/share/awesome/themes ~/.config/awesome
3. In your copy of lua.rc you will find a variable called theme_path, change it to theme_path = os.getenv("HOME") .. "/.config/awesome/themes/path/to/theme.lua"
4. Edit the variable theme.wallpaper_cmd to contain the string "eval `cat ~/.fehbg`"
5. Choose a wallpaper you like, execute $ feh --bg-scale /path/to/wallpaper.jpg

And you’re done! If you want to change your wallpaper, simply use feh again with a random other file, and make sure the file is readable when awesome is starting up, and it’ll set it up automagically. Basically, awesome’s ‘beautiful’ library takes your typed out command and executes that in order to set the wallpaper, feh has a convenient way of storing the default wallpaper by simply dumping the command that was used to set it up in the first place in a configuration file in your home directory, hence the eval `cat whatever` trick.

Screenshot of my new wallpaper in Awesome

P.S.: Don’t think you can leave out the call to os.getenv() in step 3, awesome doesn’t expand the tilde (‘~’), so the path it’ll try to access will be invalid.

P.P.S.: This is more of a note for me, in case I ever lose my epic new wallpaper. It can be found here.

bad gnome-terminal

So I’ve been a long time proponent of GNOME and all, but I recently switched to awesome instead.

Even so I like gnome-terminal a bit too much, and decided to keep it around until I found a new terminal that doesn’t pull the rest of GNOME with it when I install it.

The problem

Enter emerge -uDNvat and all of a sudden gnome-terminal complains about Failed to contact GConf daemon; exiting.. So I ask around, people reply with something along the lines of “is gconfd-2 started”, “have you installed gconfd?” and “you dumb fuck, why do you use gnome-terminal when you’re not using gnome!”.

The solution

Seems in the end it was a version mismatch, I was using gnome-terminal 2.26.x and my gnome-light package was still 2.24.x. Downgraded gnome-terminal and all was well again.

P.S. I switched to ROXTerm instead, it’s almost a clone, without all the GConf bullshit, or pulling the rest of GNOME in.