Charlie Harvey

HOWTO: Kazam ScreenCast Software on Dual Screen Debian Squeeze

Let’s start out by saying that there’s nowt wrong with gtkRecordMyDesktop as a screencasting tool. But it is a little old in the tooth, and perhaps suffers from an overly complex UI. So, I was interested to read Introducing a screencaster called Kazam, by andrew@thisblog, an insightful piece with a clear vision (making the actual code happen is also always good!) I’m running Debian Squeeze on all my desk and laptops, unfortunately Kazam’s .debs are designed for an Ubuntu environment. So this is a mini-howto partly for my own reference, but also to help out others on the interwebs who want to run kazam on Squeeze.

Six steps to a running Kazam

Note: In the comments Aron mentions that he wasn't able to get Kazam working until he replaced his ffmpeg and x264 with the ones from debian-multimedia.

  1. You need bzr installed first of all: $ sudo aptitude install bzr
  2. Now fetch the code using your lovely new bzr install: $ bzr branch lp:kazam
  3. Lets gather the dependencies from apt: sudo aptitude install libkeybinder0 libx264-98 python-keybinder \
    python-rsvg python-xlib python-distutils-extra python-pycurl
  4. Next you need to run the setup script: $ cd kazam && python setup.py install
  5. I needed to put a symlink in. Kazam had installed code to /usr/local/share, but was expecting to find it at /usr/share $ sudo ln -s /usr/local/share/kazam/ /usr/share/kazam
  6. Run Kazam for some screencasting goodness. The demo below is on my dual screen setup, though you can use one or the other screen as well as both: $ kazam

Note I doubt this will work if you want to record sound unless you have pulse audio set up. Doing that would be another howto though.

And here is a little demo of how it looks.


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