Screen Recording Software Solutions For Linux

Windows users have several options to choose from when it comes to the desktop recording (and only paid ones are good generally) but Linux users have fewer options but robust, simple, and best of all, free and open source desktop screen recording tools that we can trust on.

Below are some of the screen recording tools you might want to try:

recordMyDesktop

recordMyDesktop is a desktop session recorder for GNU/Linux written in C. recordMyDesktop itself is a command-line tool and few GUI frontends are also available for this tool. There are two frontends, written in python with pyGtk (gtk-recordMyDesktop) and pyQt4 (qt-recordMyDesktop). recordMyDesktop offers also the ability to record audio through ALSA, OSS or the JACK audio server. Also, recordMyDesktop produces files using only open formats. These are theora for video and vorbis for audio, using the ogg container.

Installation under debian and ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop

XVidCap

XVidCap is a small tool to capture things going on on an X-Windows display to either individual frames or an MPEG video. It enables you to capture videos off your X-Window desktop for illustration or documentation purposes.It is intended to be a standards-based alternative to tools like Lotus ScreenCam.

sudo apt-get install xvidcap

Istanbul

Istanbul is a desktop session recorder for the Free Desktop. It records your session into an Ogg Theora video file. To start the recording, you click on its icon in the notification area. To stop you click its icon again. It works on GNOME, KDE, XFCE and others. It was named so as a tribute to Liverpool's 5th European Cup triumph in Istanbul on May 25th 2005.

sudo apt-get install istanbul

Vnc2Flv

Vnc2flv is a cross-platform screen recording tool for UNIX, Windows or Mac. It captures a VNC desktop session (either your own screen or a remote computer) and saves as a Flash Video (FLV) file.

Wink

Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users. It requires GTK 2.4 or higher and unfortunately is just a freeware(could not find any source code for it).

Screenkast

Screenkast is a screen capturing program that records your screen-activities, supports commentboxes and exports to all video formats.

If you got any more suggestions, please drop the comment. :)


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Download Youtube Videos From Command-Line With Youtube-dl

youtube-dl is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and few more sites. All it requires is the Python interpreter version 2.5 or higher, and it is not platform specific.

This small tool is simple and offers everything you would love to have, but not the GUI. It supports several websites listed as below:

Supported sites

YouTube.com.
YouTube.com playlists (playlist URLs in "view_play_list" form).
YouTube.com searches
YouTube.com user videos, using user page URLs or the specifc "ytuser" keyword.
metacafe.com.
Google Video.
Google Video searches ("gvsearch" keyword).
Photobucket videos.
Yahoo! video.
Yahoo! video searches ("ybsearch" keyword).
Dailymotion.
DepositFiles.
blip.tv.
vimeo.
myvideo.de.
The Daily Show / Colbert Nation.
The Escapist.
A generic downloader that works in some sites.

You can download the tool from GitHub. For more information about the tool, check the documentation. The standalone executable for windows is also available for download from the same github repository.


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Rootbeer - High Performance GPU Computing in JAVA

Good news for JAVA guys that the high performance GPU compiler has been released that aims to bring high performance GPU computing to the Java Programming Language with the minimal effort from the developer.

Rootbeer is more advanced than CUDA or OpenCL Java Language Bindings. With bindings the developer must serialize complex graphs of objects into arrays of primitive types. With Rootbeer this is done automatically. Also with language bindings, the developer must write the GPU kernel in CUDA or OpenCL. With Rootbeer a static analysis of the Java Bytecode is done (using Soot) and CUDA code is automatically generated.

Rootbeer was created using Test Driven Development and testing is essentially important in Rootbeer. Rootbeer is 20k lines of product for and 7k of test code and all tests pass on both Windows and Linux. The Rootbeer test case suite covers every aspect of the Java Programming language except:
1. native methods
2. reflection
3. dynamic method invocation
4. sleeping while inside a monitor.

This means that all of the familar Java code you have been writing can be executed on the GPU.

GitHub of Rootbeer


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Slalom Canoe 2012 Google Doodle Trick

Google has been releasing the doodles with the Olympic themes and the latest one is the Slalom Canoe doodle. If you guys have not been trying these doodles, you are missing the obvious fun. In this post, I'll reveal a very very simple trick to obtain extremely short timing so that you guys can share in fb and boast with your friends :D

Most of the people have been using the HTML inspection and editing to have an awesome statistics in the doodle. The trick is to use the "Inspect Element" feature of the browsers and edit the values of different HTML elements that wrap the scores and stars.

However, many non-techies might have found that method to be cumbersome so here's even more simpler trick. The trick here is to note the system time you start canoeing and once you are near to the end of race, edit your system time to retain the value, for example, only 1 second ahead of system time you had noted while you were starting.

If you don't know how to change system time, windows users can access through the bottom right part of the Desktop where your system time is displayed and linux users should right-click and select preferences in one of the panels containing time.

You can even leave the slalom canoe tab as it is and continue your other tasks and once you feel you are to the end of the race, adjust the system time so that the difference from starting time is minimal (as you need).

The best thing about this trick is its simplicity and clean nature which leaves no trail for finding the cheating (of course, unless you decide to have too low time or negative time).

Note that this is cheating and is discouraged though :D

Original credits to Brisha for this trick.


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Download Windows Binaries For Python Packages

Someone from the University of California has made it easier for windows python users to install python extension packages easily by providing several 32-bit and 64-bit windows binaries for several scientific open source python libraries.

If you can't figure out your way in installing python libraries, you can download the binaries for several libraries from HERE.

Most binaries are built from source code found on PyPI or in the projects public revision control systems. Definitely the page to be bookmarked for the windows python'ers if you want to easily install python libraries :)


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How To Easily Install EasyInstall In 64 bit Windows

Easy Install(easy_install) is a python module (easy_install) bundled with setuptools that lets you automatically download, build, install, and manage Python packages. Easy Install gives you a quick and painless way to install packages remotely by connecting to the cheeseshop or even other websites via HTTP. It is somewhat analogous to the CPAN and PEAR tools for Perl and PHP, respectively. This How To will guide you in installing the easy_install utility easily in windows.

First download the ez_setup.py file.

Run the above script by typing in command prompt the following:

python.exe ez_setup.py

Once the script finishes, new directory "Scripts" will be created in the python installation directory and it will contain the easy_install.exe file in that directory.

Now all you have to do is add the Scripts path to system's Environment Variables to access this tool easily.

Right click on computer, go to properties, Advanced System Settings, Environment Variables, System Variables and edit the "Path" variable by adding correct path to the Scripts directory.

I hope this helps :)


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Determine Your SATA Disk Model And Vendor In Ubuntu

Sometimes you need to determine the model and vendor of your hard disk and here is the small tips on how to find those information.

All you have to do is type one of the following commands for the respective outputs:

cat /sys/class/block/sda/device/model

cat /sys/class/block/sda/device/vendor

I hope this becomes useful sometimes. :)


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Why Alias Command With Itself

Aliasing the command to itself to suppress the original functionality of the command and provide it new added sets of functionality can come quite handy for linux users and administrators.

If you have been using linux shell for a while, I'm pretty sure you are now familiar with the `ls` command, if not I think you have just learnt to use man pages. Probably you've been using `ls -l` command to list files with the files size as well. Too bad, you won't just be able to instantly make the sense of the file size displayed using this command so why not alias `ls` command to always provide human readable file sizes. So here is my alias:

alias ls='ls -lh'

This is what I always want to see as the output with `ls` command. The same kind of alias can be used with `du` and `df` commands. There are number of other cases where aliasing a command with itself is good choice.

Another example is the less command. By default, you need to press q to exit less which can be quite annoying if the entire content can fit in a single screen. However, adding -F flag will gracefully quit after displaying the content if the content fits in a single screen. So I have my alias for less as below:

alias lesss='less -F'

If something shoots in your mind, feel free to share here as a comment :)


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