Linux is great, so great that its fans would always recommend it to family and friends.
Inviting someone else to use Linux is simple but what comes after isn’t.
The best part of inviting someone to Linux is actually inviting them because after that you become their personal tech assistant which in truth can be both annoying and irritating.

Imagine being faced with a situation where you have to work through with a person (who hasn’t got the slightest idea of running commands of any kind) on how to move the Unity taskbar via terminal command or better still how to search for apps in the repository by executing a certain command.

In truth, punching in a few commands for them just so they could get their work done isn’t that bad if you are sitting right next to them but it’s difficult when you want to do it remotely.

You can try to help these rockies by recording yourself performing these tasks in the terminal and then sending them the video file.

The most common way of doing this is recording your sessions on Linux through third party apps like Simple Screen recorder. Works great and it actually records your terminal sessions perfectly but the hard part is letting the other person watch the video by finding a way to send it to their computer and the difficulty doesn’t stop there, they will have to manually punch in the commands themselves something that is not advisable and could turn disastrous.

Have no fear as there is an open source program that is here to help caught up in this kind of situations. The software is called Asciinema. The small program is installed on your Linux computer and it captures what you do in the terminal which in turn is uploaded to the Asciinema website.

The user is then provided with a URL which you can send to anyone you want to watch what you were doing. The fun doesn’t end there, not only can the people you are trying to help easily have access to the video, they can copy and paste the commands in their terminals. Handy right?

To install Asciinema use the following commands if you are using Ubuntu:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:zanchey/asciinema
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install asciinema
For those on Arch Linux, use these command:
yaourt -S asciinema

After installation is complete, all you need to do now is enter this:
asciinema rec
And you are off recording your terminal sessions, when you are done just type Exit or punch in the key combinations Ctrl+D

Once you have exited the recording, you are automatically assigned a URL which you can watch right away or share with anyone.
If you want the video to be associated with your Asciinema profile use
“asciinema auth”.