Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Have you ever wondered how you can easily capture a console session on Linux (and probably most other Unix-like OSes) without the need for special video recording software?

Here's how: you can use the script(1) command (part of the bsdutils package).

• Start the script command. Without parameters the sessions will be logged to a file called typescript. You can also supply a filename on the command line: script mysession.log.
• Type whatever you want to record...
• End the recording session with exit or CTRL-d.
• You can now view the file with less -r mysession.log (it contains line feeds, escape sequences etc., so a simple text viewer will probably display garbage). You can even print it with lpr(1). Or simply display it on the terminal with cat mysession.log.

An even cooler feature is that you can replay a script with the correct timing information:

• First you have to also record the timing information using the -t switch: script -t 2>mysession.timing mysession.log.
• You can then replay the script: scriptreplay mysession.timing mysession.log.

See the script(1) and scriptreplay(1) manpages for more details.

• Back Door Found in Diebold Voting Machines. Really? Who would have thought?
• You can now say apt-get install sun-java5-jdk (and a few other packages) in Debian, as Sun has finally relaxed its license a bit. Note that it's still not free, it's just free enough to be distributed in Debian's non-free section now ;-)
• Can We Make Operating Systems Reliable and Secure?, by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Or: How to restart an ancient flamewar...
• I reached the last level of Battle for Wesnoth, of the "Heir to the Throne" campaign to be more precise. Replays will be available when I'm through...

Battle for Wesnoth seems to become a real threat for the Debian project. More and more Debian developers get sucked into the world of elves, dwaves, orcs, zombies and mages — and only few return...

On a related note: I uploaded my Wesnoth game replays (210 KB) for everyone to enjoy. I'm currently playing the Heir To The Throne campaign and finished 16 of 26 levels so far.

For those of you who want to save the money they usually spend in the cinema — grab some beer and watch Wesnoth replays with your friends ;-)

Update 2006-06-01: Added link to the canonical location of my replays. I now provide replays for the complete Heir to the throne campaign, others will follow.