Some problems with the audio capture device cause recordMyDesktop to hang during the encoding phase, and I've had to use SIGKILL to un-hang it because lesser measures don't work. First find the process number, then kill the poor thing:

$ ps ax | grep recordmydesktop
7231 ? Sl 0:02 recordmydesktop -o /home/carla/temp/fubble.ogg -fps 15 -x 371 -y 82 -width 1309 -height 921 -channels 2 -freq 44100 -device hw:0,1 -v_quality 63 -s_quality 10 -workdir /tmp --overwrite
$ kill -9 7231

On my system it complained of not being able to find libjack.so. Creating a soft link to give it the library name it wanted cured it:

# ln -s /usr/lib/libjack.so.0 /usr/lib/libjack.so

For some crashes it will create a crash log in your home directory, such as gtk-recordMyDesktop-crash.log.

Please visit the forums on SourceForge to give and receive help. Remember that the author of recordMyDesktop, John Varouhakis, is unavailable to maintain it for the rest of the year, so here is an opportunity for ace coders looking for something cool to do.

Resources

• Better Linux Sound Managment With ALSA, Part 2
• recordMyDesktop
• MPLayer and mencoder manual

Carla Schroder is the author of the Linux Cookbook and the newly-released Linux Networking Cookbook, and is a regular contributor to LinuxPlanet.

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