Want to make screencasts as animated GIFs on Ubuntu? Well, byzanz is the best choice I ever found.

Byzanz is a small and efficient screencast creator. It records your desktop session or parts of it to an animated GIF, OGG Theora or Flash.

Below is an animated GIF created by byzanz:

It is said that byzanz does not screencast Unity-3D. However, I’ve been using it in Unity for a period of time since I was in Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal.

To install byzanz in Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 12.10, press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run below commands one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fossfreedom/byzanz

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install byzanz

This is an example I did just now:

byzanz-record --duration=15 --x=0 --y=0 --width=500 --height=350 output.gif

For more options, run:

man byzanz-record

Enjoy!