Recording the Linux desktop -- the hard way

I can do many things with the greatest of ease on the Linux desktop. But, as I discovered while doing my community Linux overview, recording a Linux desktop video isn't one of them. Oh, boy, is it ever not one of them.

My first problem was that I'd never done screen video recording before on any platform. I'd heard about Windows screen recorders such as TechSmith's Camtasia Studio and Blueberry Software's BB FlashBack, but I hadn't heard of an equivalent program for Linux.

There was a good reason for that. There isn't a full-featured screen video recorder for desktop Linux. Well, except for DemoRecorder from Christian Linhart Software that purports to do everything I needed -- but both its code and its video format is proprietary. Not only that, but I couldn't get it to work on my test systems. I abandoned it and moved on.

Next I tried VNC (Virtual Networking Computing) software -- client/server-based applications commonly used for remote computer system administration. For example, RealVNC can be used, together with programs such as vnc2swf and vncrec, to record onscreen video. Well, that's the theory anyway.

In practice, once I had the Python programming language installed, I was able to get pyvnc2swf working on Ubuntu, but I had no luck with openSUSE and Fedora. So I kept looking. My goal was to find a program that would work on all three platforms.

Next, I tried Wink, tutorial and presentation-creation software that works on both Linux and Windows. Again, I was able to build it on Ubuntu, which I was running on a 32-bit system, but it didn't get along so well on the 64-bit systems that were running openSUSE and Fedora. Back to the drawing board.

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