alt Hacker NewsIt is a strange answer because I use an alias to a ruby script ("shot") which just wraps imagemagick mostly. So I don't understand the "I don't know how to make a screenshot" part of RMS really. He seems to never fully understood why python or ruby are useful.
He was using text mode at the time in 2002. The term has something of a technical meaning that he was likely referencing. To be precise:
1. He was using a virtual console (ie. what you get when you press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and similar if using X), not an X terminal.
2. The virtual console was very likely not using a framebuffer (which would be a graphics mode), but was in fact just the Linux kernel's standard text mode output for virtual consoles, using the BIOS font.
Making a screenshot of such a text mode as a graphics file is actually not really something you can do. For the most part, the best you can do is to synthesize an equivalent image from scratch by rendering the text using another program.
That's likely what he meant when he said that he didn't know how to do a screenshot. Yes, it's overly specific, and the person who asked was probably just wanting to see what he was looking at on the monitor, which wouldnt require an exact pixel-for-pixel copy, but there you go.