Is there a way for me to take a screenshot in a virtual console?
2 Answers
There's an application called fbgrab
provided by the fbcat
package 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 fbcat
fbgrab screenshot.png
If that fails, you could always use a VM in VirtualBox.
If you want to take a picture of another TTY, fbgrab
takes a -c N
argument (where N
is replaced with the /dev/ttyN
you're using).
So if you wanted tty1:
sudo fbgrab -c 1 Desktop/tty-screenshot.png
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1When I try
fbgrab foo.png
it saysError: Couldn't open /dev/fb0.
. Any idea why?– trusktrNov 19, 2012 at 22:24 -
3@trusktr I know this is late, but it may be because you aren't in the video group. Try editing the file /etc/group, and adding your username to the end of the line that starts with "video". If that doesn't work, try using the app as root Jan 1, 2014 at 2:42
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@B1KMusic Thanks, I'll have to try it when my new laptop arrives next week. I have Windows in the interim.– trusktrJan 19, 2014 at 5:29
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1
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To take a screenshot of the first virtual console (AKA screendump) and save it to a file called "screenshot":
sudo cat /dev/vcs1 > screenshot
Using this method, the screenshots are saved in plain text format, not an image (check this with file
or mimetype
command). It simply outputs a screen dump and then EOF. Note that the output does not contain newline characters, so some processing may be required:
sudo cat /dev/vcs1 | fold > screenshot
fold
wrap each input line to fit in specified width (80 by default).
You cannot take the screenshot of a virtual console when graphics is enabled.
Reference
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1what do you mean text format? The RGB values are saved in a text file, or the text contents of the terminal is saved? Usually people want a screenshot to capture some visual bug which doesn't transfer to encoded character output. Feb 23, 2017 at 2:31