A potted account of Ross' life

You might want to look at xvfb (the X Virtual Frame Buffer) for doing screenshots without a full X server.

http://www.xfree86.org/4.0.1/Xvfb.1.html

A plan was to take thumbnails for Nautilus, so an X server would be running.  I just need a way of telling Mozilla to render to a unrealised window.

Rendering to an unrealized window makes no sense.  In classic X, a window has no storage other the framebuffer, so when it is unrealized, there is nothing to draw onto.

If you were using Keith's X server, you could use the Composite extension to redirect the contents of the mozilla widget's window heirarchy.

I doubt you'd have much luck replacing the widget's window with a pixmap though this won't help if the widget makes use of subwindows.

Hi,

Looks very cool. Eye-candish (is that a word?), but also possibly useful.

Any change of it making it into Nautilus 2.7 anytime soon?

Also, does anybody know how to re-enable the old style MIME sniffing in Nautilus 2.6 without a recompile.

Finally, any way to get text file preview in the icons in nautilus, like in KDE?

Thanks,
Victor

This option would be very welcome as a browser plugin for IE

Hi,

A big, big, THANK YOU! I was pulling my hair for two days and nights, without any luck, looking for a solution, when I found this page. Tremendously useful tool! I'm using it running headless (Xvfb), for pushing URL thumbnails to a J2ME application.

Thank you for making this available.

Andrzej

Hi,

Excellent work, thanks.

I had to make a couple of changes to get it working in Fedora.

yum install gnome-python2-gtkmozembed to get the GTK/Python/Moz stuff.

This installs the python module, but it's called "gtkmozembed", not "gtkmoz" so you need to replace this throughout the script.

Dan

Hi Ross,

Found your site here: http://www.hackdiary.com/archives/000055.html,

which was linked to from here:

http://dev.upian.com/hotlinks/

I'm using Magpie now to display an Atom feed, but like Hotlink, would like to display a screenshot (Francois, of that site, doesn't seem to be in best mood replying to my request...).

Is there a package\one time install of your 'program'? I do know some coding, but installing server add ons etc is too much asked of me.
Or where I can a more detailed explanation - as I have to ask my host to set it up.

If not possible, are there any alternatives?

Battling now for days ;-(

Thanks in advance!

Ross,

How\where did you get the required calculation script? It's really clever and much easier to implement than http://captchas.net/ (which is very good in itself).

Thanks!

You could start another X display ' startx -- :1 ' and export your display there. It's not the best idea but you can still use your pc whilst it's working :)

:( I'm using Fedora 7 & cannot get this to work for love nor money. The line self.parent.show_all() appears to cause a segmentation fault which is a shame as I think this is one of the coolest things I've seen on the web.

I managed to get this to work on Fedora Core 5, with the following steps found on this page and previous Google searchs:

- Replace references of "gtkmoz" with "gtkmozembed"
- Export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/your/mozilla/installation
- Run the script

I had 3 versions of libgtkembedmoz.so:
- One that I compiled myself from the Firefox 2.0.0.4 source code and didn't seem to work
- One from Firefox 1.5.0.1 installed from yum repositories that failed in a point different from my compiled version
- The Mozilla 1.7.12, also from yum repositories, which worked perfectly.

I have no idea why such incompatibility between libraries (maybe I can understand mine, but what about both builds from repositories?), so if anyone has a clue, please post back.

I should try this soon on a Fedora Core 7 installation, and at my Ubuntu Feisty at home and see what happens. I'll report back any findings :-)

See the following link for getting this to work under Fedora 7, and likely Ubuntu as well

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/26436/comments/47

Are people still doing screen capture / thumbnailing this way? I would like to try this, but how do I begin? Does anyone know of firefox add-ons that do this now?

I've built upon your idea, to create a commandline tool for automated / batch capturing of website thumbnails.

My main additions are the automatic launching of a VNC server, for headless / batch usage, and a guardian process to kill the main process after a timeout, so that the script won't wait forever in the case of network problems or other nuisances.

I have also written a helper script to call many instances of my main script in parallel, reusing the VNC servers, for maximum speed in thumbnail creation.

http://www.gruppo4.com/~tobia/pythumbnail.shtml

Tobia: so you haven't seen gnome-web-thumbnail then?

export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.14
works for me

related link: https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/26436

it works with Xvfb fine :
Xvfb :1 -ac
export DISPLAY=:1
python ...