How to create a screencast of your Linux desktop
Screencasts have become a very popular way to make tutorials to explain how software or services work in recent years. Let’s look at how you can make them of your own cool project, or anything cool you’re doing with Linux…
04 What you need
If you have a desktop or a laptop running a modern distribution of Linux, it should suffice for creating a screencast. However, if you throw in a good-quality microphone and a virtual machine such as a VMware workstation or VirtualBox, you could get better results. Note that if you plan to use a virtual machine for recording your screencast, the host machine should be pretty powerful in terms of resources. Even if you do not use a virtual machine, you will need a reasonably powerful machine as video encoding requires a lot of processing capabilities.
05 Install recordMyDesktop
Ubuntu, Fedora and so many other modern Linux distributions have made installing software very easy using smart package management systems such as apt‑get and YUM. Using the package manager of your distribution of Linux, install the package ‘gtk-recordmydesktop’. The software is in the repositories of the recent releases of Ubuntu Linux. To install recordMyDesktop on Ubuntu Linux, you can either execute the following in a command line terminal – ‘sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop’ – or install the software using the Synaptic Package Manager.
06 Start recording video
Now that we have the main software for our screencast installed, let’s take it for a test drive to make sure things are working fine. Launch recordMyDesktop from the application menu. If you’re using Ubuntu, go to ‘Applications>Sound and Video>gtk-recordMyDesktop’. The user interface of recordMyDesktop is attractive but quite minimal. Hit the Record button. At this point the application window will disappear. Launch some applications such as a web browser to add some content to your recording.
07 Stop recording video
Once you have recorded a few minutes’ worth of footage, you should make recordMyDesktop stop recording. The application pane would have disappeared when you hit the Record button, so you will not be able to stop the recording from there. You will see a new item added to the right-hand side of the taskbar at the top of your screen. It will look like the one in the screenshot below. Hit that button and have it stop the recording. You will then see a window pop up as recordMyDesktop will begin encoding the recording.
08 Watch your test screencast
Once the processing is done, you can watch your first test screencast. Launch the file manager, Nautilus if you are using GNOME. You should be able to find the video file saved in your user’s Home folder with a .ogv file format. Double-click the file to watch it with the default video player. Congratulations, you’ve just created your first screen capture video. This was just a test, so you can delete the video file. Let’s get cracking on our screencast now.
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Oh, thanx a lot for your tutorial!
There is a new tool called Screencast to do multithreaded screencasting in Linux with support for jack audio, so you can screencast with other system audio simultaneously to your voice recording. See:
http://freecode.com/projects/screencast
http://wiki.nosdigitais.teia.org.br/Screencast