Hi.Is there a way to have my computer take a screen shot secretly every time someone clicks a mouse?
I would like to see what's going on while I'm away without having to use up a lot of disk space with a long ongoing timed screen cast using wink or similar apps. Hopefully there would be time and date associated with the screen captures.
Thank you
Using fedora 9 on 2ghz athlon xp and Nvidia 6800

You could set up a cron to run as an example (untested) xvidcap --sf every so often.
If you wanted to take a shot on a mouse event you would need to create a program for that.

Why secretly?

If you scare off illegal users by taking screencaps, then your goal is reached. If they continue to abuse your computer it didn't make a difference whether the capture is stealth or not.

So...?

jlinkels

maybe it's not "illegal users" in meaning of hackers to watch, but family? ^^

A screenshot of a 1600X1200 monitor at 16 bits/pixel is just shy of 4 Mbytes. In an hour at the computer, I could easily click the mouse 3 times a minute, or 180 per hour. That gives 720Mbytes per hour------your hard disk or partition could be full before you had time to review the data.

OK. It's like this.
I leave this computer available for the legitimate use of internet and network printing. It is for use by youth organization leaders, and someone has been surfing a lot of porn on it. Things like teen-lesbian and others that I won't even mention here. I need to find out who it is. If I simply block those sites, then there is still a person here who has no business being around children.
any helpful ideas or solutions?
Thank you.
P.S people here do get screened, however that may just mean that they have never been caught.

If you know IP addresses of the porn sites, you can cobble together some iptables rules to log the time-stamped requests.
Replace the LQ website with your favorite porn site. Accesses will show up in your system message log, time and date stamped.
--- rod.

Probably just easier to assign everyone a username/password and then just compare logs.

If you really want to watch the individuals, you can setup a usb camera and zoneminder.

In fact, there are some software application like DemoCreator records your onscreen activities based on the clicking and typing. It is recorded as taking screen shots. It just record the mouse clicking and keyboard typing. This way would not cost you much space. But it is not totally running secretly, you still see the small icon on the task bar.

One friend told me another similar screen recorder DemoBuilder can record hide the small icon on the task bar by some settings. But both just work in Windows PC. You may check it out.

It's not screen shots you need, it shots from a Web cam so you can see WHO it is.. time stamped web cam shots along with a Log of the websites browsed, will sort it right out.. They won't be able to say, "someone else must have my login !! if you have a web cam shot..