Just a short note today. If you look for screencasting software for your linux box, I recommend two titles: recordMyDesktop and Wink.
The first one is a typical desktop activity recorder – you mark capture area and that’s all. No fancy options: just a pure video stream from your screen. Video has very good quality (theora and vorbis codecs).
Wink is a screencaster oriented towards preparing interactive tutorials and presentations. You can record screen activity, but also pause the video, add text boxes with explanations, buttons waiting for user interaction (for example “Next” buttons). Output formats are: SWF, standalone EXE (for Windows machines only), PDF, PostScript and HTML. No typical video files, which on the other hand is not really a problem, as the framerate of the recording is pretty small. Another issue is that it apparently cannot record properly windows rendered with OpenGL (like molecular viewers) – window’s interior comes black. Even with these limitations I think Wink is better for preparing tutorials (for example on usage of some online bioinformatics service) than typical screencasting software.
Freelancing science 
Steve Foerster
October 20, 2009 at 03:23
Wink was a big fail for me, I installed it on Ubuntu 9.04, started it, and played around with it, but it didn’t seem to do… anything. Like, at all. Then the tutorials wouldn’t render. Very disappointing.
Marc Achtelig
January 27, 2010 at 14:04
Maybe good additions to this post are the checklist of criteria for selecting a screencasting tool at http://www.indoition.com/screencasting-tool-choosing.htm, as well as the list of screencasting tools at http://www.indoition.com/screencasting-tools-survey.htm.