When you have a program running in a hidden X screen (like with Xvfb for Selenium tests) you may want to look at that hidden screen occasionally.
First, find out what X displays are currently active:
netstat -nlp | grep X11
This should give you some results like these:
unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 8029600 4086/Xvfb /tmp/.X11-unix/X99
unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 8616 - /tmp/.X11-unix/X0
unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 8615 - @/tmp/.X11-unix/X0
unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 8029599 4086/Xvfb @/tmp/.X11-unix/X99
In that case displays 0 and 99 are active and you can see that 99 is provided by Xvfb.
Next, simply make a screenshot from that display, e.g. with scrot
:
DISPLAY=:99 scrot
This will create a timestamped PNG file in your current directory. You may also pass a custom filename to scrot.
Look at the screenshot with your favorite tool.
Posted by Arne Hartherz to makandra dev (2011-07-25 14:01)