Valve's Linux-based SteamOS has been out for a couple of days now, and we've been busily hammering away on our own Ars Technica Steam Machine. We'll be bringing you a short video tour of the operating system later today, but actually creating that video tour required a bit of command line tomfoolery. We ended up with a working technique to capture video and wanted to share it.

There isn't a screen recorder or FRAPS-like video capture equivalent bundled with SteamOS, so we can pick and choose from a number of different open source applications that fit the bill. After a bit of digging, we went with RecordMyDesktop, which can do audio and video from any attached Linux display. Rather than worry about compiling it from source, SteamOS's Debian heritage comes to the rescue: there's a package available on the Debian Wheezy repository.

SteamOS comes configured to pull packages only from Valve's repositories, but that's all right—we're going to download the package directly and install it. However, there are a couple of things to do first.

The caveat: no sound (yet!)

Before we even get into the how-to bits, though, there is one important thing to note: the method below will get you beautiful video without sound—for now anyway. We spent quite a bit of time trying to find the right command line-fu to get audio recorded to go along with our video, but we haven't been successful yet.

I'm sure that it's just a matter of more fully understanding SteamOS's configuration and bolting on the right arguments, but for now, it's video only. If you've got any tips or ideas on how to get sound working, we'd love to hear from you in the comments.

Connecting via ssh

First, you're going to need to be able to connect to your SteamOS box via ssh, because this will save us a lot of pain and contortions when we actually get to the part where we're recording video. SteamOS doesn't come with an ssh server package, but that's easily fixed with one from the Valve repositories.

To install it, exit the Steam overlay and enter the Linux desktop environment (click "Exit" and "Return to desktop environment," assuming you've enabled the option to do so in the SteamOS settings). Summon a terminal window by moving your mouse to the upper-left corner, clicking "Applications," and then clicking "Terminal" from the application list.

This will get you into a bash prompt. From here, install the OpenSSH server package by typing the following command:

sudo aptitude install openssh-server

Because we're using the sudo command (short for "super user do") to execute the aptitude package manager with root privileges, you will be prompted for a password to continue. The default password for the desktop account is "desktop," so enter that (all lower-case, no quotes, no comma, obviously). You won't see any asterisks or spaces appear after the password prompt as you type—this is normal.

After the OpenSSH server has been installed, you'll need to determine your SteamOS box's IP address so that you'll be able to connect to it. From the terminal window you've got open, type the following command:

/sbin/ifconfig

This will run the ifconfig program, which will show you your network interface status. The output will look something like this:

desktop@steamos:~$ /sbin/ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 44:8a:5b:24:fc:aa inet addr:10.10.10.206 Bcast:10.10.10.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::468a:5bff:fe24:fcaa/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:487359 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:105786 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:704241341 (671.6 MiB) TX bytes:50373286 (48.0 MiB) lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:65536 Metric:1 RX packets:16 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:16 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:1584 (1.5 KiB) TX bytes:1584 (1.5 KiB)

We're interested in eth0 , which is your SteamOS Ethernet adapter. Look for the inet addr: line and note the IP address listed.

Now that we know where we're going, you can remotely connect to the SteamOS box from another computer with an SSH client. If you're using a Mac or a Linux box, then all you need is the built-in terminal. If you're running Windows, you should download PuTTY.