Can I take a screenshot of a virtual console?

Question

Is there a way for me to take a screenshot in a virtual console?

Answer 1

There's an application called fbgrab that (as the name might suggest) grabs a shot of the current framebuffer. This might not work on newer KMS setups.

sudo apt-get install fbgrab
fbgrab screenshot.png

If that fails, you could always use a VM in VirtualBox.

Answer 2

To take a screenshot of the first virtual console and save it to a file called "screenshot"

sudo cat /dev/vcs1 > screenshot

Using this method, the screenshots are saved in the text format, you cannot take the screenshot of a virtual console when graphics is enabled.