Aside from just writing some simple description I also wanted to present a short screencast for my projects on github. After some rial an error I finally came up with the following solution:

• Create a screencast with SimpleScreenRecorder
• Convert the resulting video from SimpleScreenRecorder to a series of images
• Finally, convert and combine the series of images into one GIF file.

You can either compile SimpleScreenRecorder from source or install one of the provided packages. In addition see the wiki entry at ubuntuusers.

mplayer -ao null <videofile> -vo jpeg:outdir=/path/to/output

cconvert /path/to/output/* -layers Optimize optimised.gif

Further size reductions can be achieved with:

convert output.gif -fuzz 10% -layers Optimize optimised.gif

Check the convert man page for more information.

Regarding SimpleScreenRecorder you will have to play with the settings like frame rate, skipping frames and so on to find a setting that fits best for you.