Debian Packages Screenshots Repository Launched

Christoph Haas writes "A picture is worth a thousand words. And thanks to screenshots.debian.net this finally comes true for Debian packages. The new website was launched just a week ago and has already collected screenshots for 740 packages shipping with the Linux distribution — with new uploads pouring in every hour. Debian users can finally get an impression of how an application would look before installing it."

Great, but needs guidelines.

Great idea, but it needs some guidelines. Styling being the most obvious one (no I don't want to see how it looks using the custom skin you made that shows off several varieties of wood), but much more importantly is libraries. If you have a look through their "things needing screenshots" section, you'll notice that it's full of libs, many of which have no interface at all. That being the case, why are they there? Seems to me like all the data here needs some garbage collection and more rigid guidelines.

Re:Great, but needs guidelines.

Great idea, but it needs some guidelines.

Yeah, guidelines like these [debian.net] would be great.

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Those guidelines govern the screenshots themselves, not what does and does not warrant a screenshot.

For instance... what possible reason would you want a screenshot for the 'linux-image' package?

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Wow, 800x600 resolution is pretty harsh. Nobody uses that as a desktop resolution anymore, so every screenshot will be resized, and harder to read. They really should try to support a decent resolution, 1024x768 at a bare minimum.

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Or you could just take a screengrab of a single window. There are only two windows usually on my desktop larger than 800x600: my browser and a text editor.

Re:Great, but needs guidelines.

Hard to enter information in on application that requires you to be examining the other application, if they arn't both on screen at once.

Different kinds of work require different layouts.

Also, just because you use your windows maximized, doesn't mean you can't dial that back to take a screenshot. If your widgets can't handle a resize, said application has some issues...

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I've been thinking for a while now that what we need is a comic book style layout. As applications open windows, a new panel opens up, shrinking all the other windows so that every non-minimized window gets screen space with no overlapping. For example: One window would take the whole screen; two would split the screen and be side by side; three would be done as one on the left half, two splitting the right half, one on top, one below; etc. The panels would be resizeable and it should be easy to re-sequ

Re:Great, but needs guidelines.

You've just described tiling window managers. You might want to look at Xmonad, Awesome, DWM, StumpWM or WMII. I personally use Xmonad and definitely wouldn't go back to a traditional window manager.

Re:Great, but needs guidelines.

On Windows, you can always make up a screenshot of any DLL file by opening it in Dependency Walker, and listing the functions exported by the DLL. I'm sure there has to be something similar for Linux.

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even if you could post a picture representing a library, there seems to be little point. After all the idea of this picture repository is to give people a sense of what a program will look like before they decide to install it. In this case, installing a library by itself does nothing until a program is installed which actually uses it.

Re:Great, but needs guidelines.

On Windows, you can always make up a screenshot of any DLL file by opening it in Dependency Walker, and listing the functions exported by the DLL. I'm sure there has to be something similar for Linux.

man nm

# nm /lib/libz.so
0000cb88 A _DYNAMIC
0000cc44 A _GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_
[...]
00005f64 T zcalloc
00005f88 T zcfree
00005f28 T zlibVersion
#

Re:Great, but needs guidelines.

True, but most of the open-source programs begin this way. Hackish and just working as the developers want it. After that you get feature enchancements and discussions about implementation of functionality. I expect that the lib picture problem is full resolved in a month or 3.

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Wow, +5 Informative. Mega Whoosh on the mods.

still waiting for the yes(1) screenshot ;(

y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y

:)

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I think that screenshots for "true" and "false" are going to be even more interesting.

Re:still waiting for the yes(1) screenshot ;(

No, you just didn't let it run all the way through.

A killer feature?

This is a very good idea. I could see this being one of those new killer features to brings linux to more desktops. Integrating this into a package manager could really help new users see the (perceived) quality of some of the software projects available to them -- most people only see GUIs. Integrate a user comment/review section for individual programs, and it becomes even more accessible.

I'm aware that this is already contained in a site like freshmeat, but the point would be to make a unified experience to the new/old user. Throw in bug submission, and it's even more useful. A single program to browse, view screenshots, review/comment and submit bugs for programs. You could even throw in a paypal donation, which either gets disbursed to everybody or specific projects. There's a lot that could be done, and this is one area that OSS really shines.

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And if we're going to go for the whole moon-on-a-stick. Unified bugs, donations, screenshots and installation/uninstallation of programs, all in one program, and the same frontend program available on all (well, most sane) distros, whichever backend package management they use. Maybe add something to individual package files so that 3rd party packages can also use these features, by having the magic program connect to the 3rd party developer's website or server. No idea about the practicality or implicat

More Colab Please

Would have been really better if they had tried to gather some cross distro support, and host it somewhere other than *.debian.net. Especially as we are moving toward a package UI abstraction in the form of PackageKit.

How do I like look?

Debian users can finally get an impression of how an application would like look before installing it.

But what if I want to know what an application would look like, not how it will like look, after it will have been installed?

Screenshots

Great idea, absolutely but is it really necessary? When I want to try out a package, I immediately just type the name into Google Images and get a good impression that way.
But it's of course great for Linux-newbs to see it. It's probably more eyecandy than useful.

Synaptic

I read on the site that someone integrated this into Synaptic, can't wait to try that out later.

Also there's an image for Extreme Tux Racer but not Tux Racer. Boo.

Sooo..praytell...

What exactly does a screenshot of openldap-server look like?

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Forgot about that checkbox, eh?

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Sorry, you have forever been marked as a troll.