The Linux Daily

Grabbing or Displaying Direct Frame Buffer Image

Without going into too much detail, here’s a very simple way of grabbing what’s being displayed on the screen in an embedded Linux system:

cat /dev/fb0 > image.raw

You can then display the image back to the screen by using:

cat image.raw > /dev/fb0

If you’re worried about size, you can compress the raw image file and then unpack it when you need to display an image (like a splashscreen):

gzip image.raw
gunzip image.raw.gz > /dev/fb