Istanbul is a handy desktop session recorder for Ubuntu / Linux Mint. It saves the recorded sessions in OGG format video files and is easy to install and use.

To install it :

1. Open Terminal and type :

2. Once installed, it will show up in Applications menu under Sound & Video section.

3. Clicking it won’t show any pop up window or stuff like that but there will be a red dot in the system tray. Right clicking on that brings up various options regarding how the desktop session is to be recorded.

4. Start recording by clicking the red dot, when recording it will become a grey square. To stop recording, click it again and it will become red dot again. On stopping recording, the dialog box requiring the location for storing the recorded session will show up.

This is a useful screen capture / desktop recording application  for quickly recording desktop sessions. An alternative to this is XVidcap which does the same thing but stores the recorded sessions in MPEG format.

Cheers.