In April I bought a Dell Latitude and since I was writing for Opensource.com I wanted to run Fedora. It’s not required but I thought it would be nice. I tried hard to find ways to run Fedora with the Broadcom wireless card that came installed in the Latitude. Chagrined that I could not find a good driver I decided to go with Ubuntu on the desktop and live with the Unity interface which I didn’t really like. Fast forward a couple of months and I read a blog post on MyLinuxRig where Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said he too had a Dell and solved the wireless issue with an Intel wireless card. That was great news for me. It’s one of those ideas I just hadn’t thought of. I’m grateful to Jim and that he shared his experience. This week I got an Intel Corporation Wireless 3160 card from Amazon and installed it this afternoon. Then I installed Fedora and now I’ll show up in Raleigh for All Things Open in good shape with my new platform. I’m glad to back on Fedora and Gnome whIch I prefer.
The Road to Raleigh and All Things Open 2015
In a few days I’ll be boarding a flight that will take me to Raleigh-Durham International and eventually to the All Things Open Conference which is next week. As I was driving home tonight I thought of the journey that began nearly twenty years ago that brought me to this point. I thought of my experiences with Linux and open source software and the many servers and desktops I’ve built and rebuilt over the years that foreordained this trip. On Sunday I’ll be attending a meeting of community-moderators of Opensource.com in Red Hat Tower. None of this was on my radar in the days when I used to piece together old computers in storage closets at my place of employment and install a variety of Linux distributions on them. I thought of my efforts to have Red Hat Linux approved as a software standard for use in public schools of Western New York State almost eleven years ago. I’m thrilled at the prospect of meeting others from all over the world who also believe that the present and future hold unlimited potential for those individuals and entities who use open source software. When I retired from public education a couple of years ago I thought I had reached the limit of my endeavors with Linux and open source software.
Emerson once said, every wall is a door,” and my retirement opened a door to unimagined possibilities. One of those possibilities has been my participation in the wonderful enterprise of Opensource.com as a community moderator. In the past ten months I’ve learned a lot about writing, interviewing and participation. I’ve learned about more than software and hardware. I’ve learned about being a part of a wonderful open organization. I’ve been welcomed, empowered and encouraged by a unique team of individuals who have helped me to realize that I still have much to give.
Simple Screen Recorder – Easy Screencasting on Linux
In my spare time I volunteer as a digital literacy trainer in our local library. Recently I put together a training wiki that featured a number of YouTube videos on a variety of topics including word processing. I could not find exactly what I wanted to introduce my students to LibreOffice so I decided I would create my own. I considered a number of options for doing that but finally setttled on “Simple Screen Recorder” which is an open source software released on the GPL3 license. I liked it because unlike the other programs I had considered it had a very simple interface but produced high quality video files which I could easily upload to YouTube and then share in my wiki. “SimpleScreenRecorder” allows a user to capture the whole screen or just a self selected rectangle. Files can be saved as Matroska, Ogg, WebM and MP4.
I liked “SimpleScreenRecorder” because it was so easy to use and it provided exactly what I was looking for. I have used other proprietary screen capture programs which cost a hundred dollars and more while not providing a more intuitive interface. “Simple Screen Recorder” has a number of features that I liked including: graphical interface; the ability to record an entire screen or just a portion of it; synchronization of audio and video; pause and resume and the use of hot-keys for starting and ending recordings.
I installed it using instructions provided on their website. They provide instructions for Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Slackware, OpenSuse and others. I also found RPMs that allow it to be installed on Fedora. Once installed the user opens a terminal and enters “simplescreenrecorder” on the command line and the program starts. After a welcome screen the user is presented with some very simple choices about area to be recorded. I chose a rectangle and could easily select it with a “cross-hair” type selection tool. At the next screen I was presented with choices of the name of my recorded file along with the format. I chose MP4 for video and MP3 for audio and then I began my recording. The source code for Simple Screen Recorder can be found at, https://github.com/MaartenBaert/ssr.
Here is a short YouTube video I created with “Simple Screen Recorder” to demonstrate how easy the program is to use. You can report bugs and submit feature requests on GitHub: https://github.com/MaartenBaert/ssr/issues or if you don’t have a GitHub account you can send requests directly to Maarten Baert via email.