Only the other day I was talking with someone who does a lot of work on the shell command line, but hadn’t used the GNU screen tool, so I’d better scribble a post about it as I regard it as an absolute must-have for any remote work, for multiple reasons.

First of all, what screen does. You start screen inside a terminal session (local or SSH remote), and then you can create additional sessions though Ctrl-A C. The initial screen is number 0, the next one 1, and so on. You can switch between screens with Ctrl-A # where # is the screen number. This way, you can have multiple things going within a single ssh connection, very handy. But that’s not all!

If you get disconnected (it happens and you reconnect, your screen sessions will still be there, and running too. You can reattach with screen -r. To do a nice disconnect, you can do Ctrl-A D (detach) before …

This weekend I was doing some development for one of our projects and we needed to make screenshots of a web pages (see my next posts about this task). I’ve managed to develop small piece of code which uses GtkMozEmbed component (Mozilla Gecko-based renderer for web pages) to create screenshots of any page, but there was some problem… The problem was a following: GTK+ library can’t work w/o fully-functional X server running on your machine. Obviously I didn’t want to run such software (no monitor/keyboard/mouse, dumb graphics adapter on the server, etc, etc) so I’ve tried to find some solution… And in this tiny article I’ll describe the method I’ve managed to find.

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