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Debian Packages Screenshots Repository Launched

Posted by timothy on from the worth-1024-words-a-least dept.

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."

3 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Great, but needs guidelines. by Dwedit · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Great, but needs guidelines. by MasterOfMagic · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Great, but needs guidelines. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Wow, 800x600 resolution is pretty harsh.

    It is, but the other way to look at it is whether applications should be able to work at 800x600, especially considering the Eee PC / MSI Wind / OLPC portables and their resolution requirements. Remember that this is more about using these screenshots in package managers like Synaptic and seeing a clickable thumbnail of what it'd look like. I'm a web designer and I understand the constraints of resolutions and GUI design, and this is going to make some applications look a bit cramped. These applications should probably be designed a bit better though considering the portables market that Linux is getting a foothold in.

    so every screenshot will be resized, and harder to read.

    Well I'd hope that they'd crop the image, not resize it :) A bit of gimpery and you can even crop a 1600x1200 image down to something that looks like it was taken on an 800x600 screen and this screenshot repo would never know any different.