"Black" Screenshot Workaround For Mutter Based DE

There is a knows bug that affects taking screenshot in Mutter based desktop environments like Gnome-Shell, Cinnamon and Pantheon.

This only affect users that have installed ATI proprietary drivers, screenshot will be black or only show desktop background.



One and only for now workaround to take screenshot is switching from tty1 and back to tty7 (desktop).
You can switch to tty1 using keyboard shortcut CTRL + ALT + F1 and to switch back to desktop CTRL + ALT + F7

You can create a script and will switch to tty1 and back and take screenshot but that will require root privileges. You can also run script with gksudo and that will require password for taking screenshot screenshot.

If you are interested in using script (you need to run it with sudo or gksudo)

chvt 1
chvt 7
gnome-screenshot

You can try using import command
It works if you try to capture only one window for example

import -window steam screenshot.jpg

But if you trie to camture entire scrren it looks like this:

import -window root screenshot.jpg

Other tools like scrot, gimp, shotwell behave same as default.

If you need to take in game screenshots note that taking screenshots in Steam (F12 default) works with no problems.

Other solution is to not use ATI proprietary drivers and use default open source drivers. Also you can use other window manager like Metacity, this is not possible with Gnome-Shell and Cinnamon but with Pantheon is possible (you will not have some features available with Gala) but if you need to take screenshots and you need ATI proprietary drivers this is one solution

While users report that this issue have been fixed with latest version of Cinnamon, i tried installing latest Cinnamon version and issue is still there.

I have this problem on Ubuntu 12.04 as base with 13.1 ATI proprietary drivers. Not sure if this problem exist with newer Xserver or newer ATI proprietary drivers.