Friday, August 9, 2013

Creating a Screen Capture Tutorial on a Chromebook

So I've gotta hand it to my colleague Nathalie at the Adler, cause just yesterday she solved this problem for me without even knowing it. We were talking about creating video tutorials and she suggested creating a G+ Hangout without any guests, recording it to YouTube, and then using the screen capture functionality to create the tutorial. Brilliant. Unfortunately, this guy already beat me and Nathalie to it though.

Capturing a static screen is easy enough, just do a Ctrl+, adding a Shift allows you to select the region of the screen.

My goal is to create a video tutorial for my students to help them hack the Chromebook to run Linux Ubuntu. There are some great tutorials out there in the blogosphere already, but kids hate reading. So I'll try to pull this off in Chrome OS using G+ Hangouts. Once I'm in Ubuntu, I'll have to switch to another tool.

The regular G+ Hangout environment doesn't support lonely hangouts or streaming to YouTube. To do that, you need to go live using Hangouts On Air. The upside is the video capture, the downside is that people get to sneak into your hangout if they're trolling the hangouts website.

So lets give this a shot... first, I'm going to skip a few steps but to try and create a tutorial that will launch the already installed Linux Ubuntu OS using the Chrome OS crosh terminal. This requires three steps:

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+t to open a crosh terminal window in Chrome;

2. Type shell at the chrosh> prompt and hit enter to call the shell prompt


3. Enter sudo enter-chroot startxfce4 at the chronos@localhost / $ command line and press enter (CHECK: no spaces between enter, hyphen and chroot); 


This will launch the xfce desktop environment on the Ubuntu Linux OS already installed.

Now... in video tutorial format:

Not bad for my first attempt. Clearly though, I will need a little scripting to get this right.

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