Many times a simple screencast showing how to do something by using a series of screenshots in sequence in a video can explain what paragraph after paragraph of words cannot. Linux and a few open source applications make the job of creating such screencasts easy.

There are several ways to grab screenshots in Linux. The method that I employ here is a shell script that uses the ImageMagick import program.

This script takes one parameter, the internal ID of the window that will be captured, which you can get by running the command xwininfo -frame. The xwininfo program will give you all of the X11 information about the window/frame that you click on, but the only line you need to see is the first one.

After all the screenshots have been captured, you can start putting them together in a video file. The ImageMagick convert program will combine all of the miff files into one video file.

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