How To Install Scrot on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Scrot on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Scrot is an excellent command-line utility that allows users to take snapshots of the whole screen or a particular window. It supports multiple image formats (JPG, PNG, GIF, etc).

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Scrot screenshot tool on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues
• Ensure that your Ubuntu system is connected to the internet. This is crucial as it allows you to download the required packages and the Scrot installation.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Scrot on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install apt-transport-https dirmngr

Step 2. Installing Scrot on Ubuntu 20.04.

• Install Scrot using apt default Ubuntu repository.

By default, Scrot is not available on Ubuntu 20.04 base repository. Now run the following command below to install the Scrot screenshot tool on your Ubuntu system:

sudo apt install scrot

• Install Scrot from the official GitHub repository.

Run the following command below to download the installer from GitHub:

wget https://github.com/resurrecting-open-source-projects/scrot/releases/download/1.7/scrot-1.7.tar.gz
tar -xvf scrot-1.7.tar.gz
cd /scrot-1.7
./configure
make
su -c "make install"

Step 3. How to Use Scrot to take ScreenShot

To start, here’s how you can screenshot a complete window on Ubuntu:

scrot

If you want to capture a screenshot of whatever is on focus on your screen now or something else, you can use this command:

scrot file1.png

To learn about Scrot’s other options, check out its documentation by typing man Scrot in a terminal window, or read it online.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Scrot. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Scrot command-line screen capture utility on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Scrot website.