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Linux in Movies? 210

Posted by Cliff from the penguins-in-the-media dept.
chicagoan asks: "Last weekend I, like many other people across the US, saw Scary Movie 3. During the movie an actress gets on the web to help her in her quest. Looking closer I noticed that the Desktop environment she was using was GNOME and the Web Browser was Mozilla's Firebird. Where have you spotted actor's using Linux in movies or on TV shows?"
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Linux in Movies? More

Linux in Movies?

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  • Matrix (Score:2, Informative)

    by buttahead ( 266220 )
    i thought they were using linux in the matrix on screen... matrix 1 that is.

    • Re:Matrix (Score:2, Informative)

      by PD ( 9577 ) *
      Why yes, it was Linux [theregister.co.uk]. If, by Linux, you mean nmap.

    • Re:Matrix (Score:2, Interesting)

      by BrokenHalo ( 565198 )
      i thought they were using linux in the matrix on screen... matrix 1 that is.

      Yes, but I seem to remember Neo was using a Microsoft Natural keyboard :-)

      OK, big deal. So am I, and my machines haven't run Windows for 6 years.

    • Re:Matrix (Score:2, Informative)

      by Myridon ( 719720 )
      The computer screens in The Matrix on the Nebuchadnezzar are not running Linux but proprietary hardware running proprietary firmware/software - AMX touch panels [warnerbros.com] I worked for AMX at the time but was not involved with the movie.

    • Re:Matrix (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Aeonsfx ( 675982 )
      I don't know about what the OS was, but I'm pretty sure that from seeing the terminal prompt that it was the csh or tcsh. ;)

      --Tim

  • Antitrust (Score:4, Interesting)

    by aspjunkie ( 265714 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @02:43AM (#7326311) Homepage
    I think Antitrust was one of the first 'hollywood movies' that I saw that had some form of Linux on some of the workstaions.

    Claire Forlanni, and Rachel Leigh Cook..

    What a great movie.

    Poor Teddy.. he just wanted to Open Source his code...is that such a crime!?!
    • Yes, but notice how the evil and oppressive (let's say MS-like) company was using Linux (and you can't prove that it was linux and not some other OS).
    • Actually not ..

      most people remember hackers the movie with Miss Jolie, well if you look very closely at some of the "hacking" screens you can see the terminal is unix based, not indicative of linux per say, but at least it's not windows ;P

      I also many years ago planned to start a website dedicated to finding technical things in movies, like what OS was used for visual etc etc not limited to computers but anything technical. unfortunately life happened.

      bain

      • Re:Antitrust (Score:3, Funny)

        by bhtooefr ( 649901 )
        Errm, a full-screen telnet to SDF would take care of that REALLY quick in Winders. So would a fullscreen Cygwin-bash session.

        Also, what are you doing posting to /. if you have a life? You should know (having a sub-2000 UID) that none of us have lives by now!

    • Re:Antitrust (Score:5, Funny)

      by kurosawdust ( 654754 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @05:37AM (#7326777)
      What a great movie.

      Thanks - I never weeped for my generation before 10am prior to reading that. Congrats.

    • Don't forget that Miguel de Icaza [com.com] of GNOME fame has a cameo...
    • I watched Willard for the first time a few days ago. Most of the computers in the office are on the green screen, but when Willard comes in with Ben to take revenge on the boss I noticed that the boss is running Gnumeric, Netscape 6, and surfing porn sites. Interestingly enough, peekabooweb.com featured in the movie is registered by AOL but has no IP assigned.

      I took some screenshots to put on my website but haven't had the time yet.

  • You're not going to like this reference (Score:5, Funny)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @02:51AM (#7326346) Homepage Journal
    I spotted one. I was watching a commercial for Earthlink. It featured two dudes trying outbid each other on Ebay on an item with only 30 seconds left. The guy with Earthlink won because his connection was faster. The guy who lost, his page was still loading. If you look carefully, he's running KDE as his desktop. I found that quite amusing. ;)

    (Note: I couldn't tell you what OS the 'winner' was using.)
    • You're not going to like this reference
      ...unless you're a GNOME user.
    • I just saw that commercial, and I find that Earthlink claiming that they can speed up pages so that you don't lose an auction is ridiculous.
      • "I just saw that commercial, and I find that Earthlink claiming that they can speed up pages so that you don't lose an auction is ridiculous."

        In the "It happens all the time" sense, you're right, it's totally stupid. In the "it could potentially play out that way, and you could run into problems sort of like that" sense then it's somewhat plausible. When it gets to dealing with near real-time interaction (such as getting down to the last 30 seconds of an auction), the broadband guy is going to have a cl
        • I thought that the way the Earthlink thing worked was by caching sites you visit a lot? Yeah that helps with loading the Ebay logo but how does it make the connection to the db server at Ebay any faster?

          And when the guy that lost refreshed his screen why did all the graphics load again? Those should have been in the local cache.
      • You might think so but, your thinking is incorrect. Earthlink now offers an add-on service that accelerates dial-up performance considerably. It works by using caching and compression. People who subscribe to the service for $5.00 per month above the regular dial-up costs, install a small application on their desktop that handles redirecting requests to the cache and also handles the decompression from the cache. On average, there is a significant performance increase.

        Personally, it annoys me that someone

  • GUI proof? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by __aafkqj3628 ( 596165 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @02:53AM (#7326353)
    Can we really accept a GNOME/KDE/whatever GUI as proof that they are running Linux?
    AFAIK, the movies which people are claiming to be featuring Linux don't show off any proof (a uname would be helpful) that it's actually Linux, and now *BSD, IRIX, Solaris or even UNIXWare...
    • Very good point. I run an Ultra 5 with Blackbox and a few of the KDE apps (all hail the mighty KMail). Apart from the fact that there's a type 5 keyboard in front of the monitor it looks identical to the setup running on my SuSE laptop. Such is the wonder of X and open-source window managers I suppose, no matter what Unix like OS you're using you can have your favourite WM and apps.

      That said, KDE is most easily setup on a i386/Linux box (Solaris now ships with GNOME), so it's likely that the props/set-des

  • Chappelle's Show (Score:4, Funny)

    by JAYOYAYOYAYO ( 700885 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @03:08AM (#7326403)
    Its a skit based show on comedy central.. one of the skits was a spoof of a company policy video shown to employees at a copy store (think kinkos) "if a customer brings in a windows disk, tell them we only use macintosh. if they bring in a mac disk, tell them we only use windows... if they bring in a linux disk, tell them the computers are down."
    • Chappelle's Show is awesome. The next best thing to a sequel for half baked.
  • I saw a lame computer movie with Julia Roberts that had the blue steel theme from Enlightenment running on it.

  • Reason? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by twistedcubic ( 577194 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @03:26AM (#7326479)
    I guess the tech consultants they hire probably do this for the coolness factor, but maybe they don't display MS Windows because all the other companies pay them millions for product placement. So why advertise MS Windows for free?
    • I would think that using some sort of Non-MS based PC would make perfect economical sense when shooting a film. It really isn't hard to get the point across that a character is using an web-browser, why bother spending $199 for a license to run Windows, when the same thing can be accomplished on any semi-recent stock Linux distro with used hardware?

      Not to mention that you get the added bonus of being able to customize the appearance of the GUI to suit the needs of the movie.

      I could just see a fairly seri
      • To start off with, almost every PC bought would have had the Microsoft Tax slapped on it already, so the "economical sense" does not make much sense. Secondly, $199 is chump change for most movies you and I will get to see on telly or at the movies, so $99 doesn't really matter, and thirly, by far the vast majority of "OS" shots are usually powerpoint slides or somesuch (*much* easier to "customise")
        • And perhaps here you've hit the reason to use Linux.

          No doubt every film has some geek somewhere who is responsible for setting up computer shots. It's easier to customize a Linux screen, perhaps easier than using a powerpoint slide, especially when it comes to having the screen do something. Then with powerpoint there's the extra work of fitting it back into the movie.
      • I could just see a fairly serious scene be ruined by XP's Fischer-Price GUI...

        "Quality" shows such as ER and Navy:NCIS both use XP on their sets - look at the monkeypox-like outbreak episode of ER, or ANY episode of NCIS.

  • jurassic park (Score:2, Informative)

    by undef24 ( 159451 )
    The only thing I can think of thats close is IRIX in jurassic park. Something like: "This is a Unix System .. I Know This!"
  • There was the SSHnuke from Matrix: Reloaded. Also in Jurrasic park the scene where the girl goes. "I know this. Its UNIX". Even though she had a 3d graphical file browser that SGI had written.

    Rus
  • You all talk about a hacker nuking ssh and some lady browsing the web with FireBird. That's all small 'taters. If you really want to see Linux in a movie check this [thinkgeek.com] out. Oh yes.
  • I went to saw Nicotina [imdb.com] a few weeks ago, and every computer on screen was running KDE.

    They even zoom in on a Russian guy working on his laptop and we discover that he is actually playing the KDE version of Tetris :-)

  • ABC's Alias (TV Show) (Score:3, Informative)

    by antdude ( 79039 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @05:07AM (#7326721) Homepage Journal
    See my newsgroup thread [google.com] on KDE. There's even Ping Pong game (xMame?). Sunday night's showed Marshall using a compiler! :)
    • Sunday night's showed Marshall using a compiler! :)

      Yeah, that was funny. He was trying to de-fang some amazing AI virus that was about to take over the world, the only shots of the screen that we got to see showed us a standard configure script and a Makefile. :)
    • In one of the shows, Sydney had to break into a german installation and hack into their security system. The screen language was german, but they misspelled the text... which is a minor mistake, given that they had the right intention :)

      Or maybe they did it on purpose... you never know.

      And yes, I'm aware that I probably messed up the grammar in this post really bad (not to mention spelling mistakes - even though I used the preview button; twice).
  • I like playing "Find my laptop", ala the Powerbook G4/Tibook. It's amazing, the nubmer of apples you see on TV and in movies. Most people suggest that they use apples, as they're what they already have laying around, as apples tend to be used alot in the entertainment buisness, plus they look pretty on screen compared to a beige box. I'd agree with that.

    I heard someone suggest that most of the "OS"es in movies are simply flash programs that are full screen, and will do the correct sequence of events, regar

    • I heard someone suggest that most of the "OS"es in movies are simply flash programs that are full screen, and will do the correct sequence of events, regardless of the input. Can anyone verify this?

      Macromedia Director, actually. I guess they might have moved to Flash these days, but yeah, computers in big-budget movies are just playing these scripts.

      The computer in this movie was probably running windows and displaying a director or flash movie of GNOME.

      -Isaac

    • Most people suggest that they use apples, as they're what they already have laying around

      Not necessarily. Apple computers are the only machines distinctive enough to benefit from product placement. If you put a Dell laptop in a film, how are people going to tell at a distance that it's a Dell and not a Toshiba or Compaq? Whenever you can recognize a product in a film, it's often a paid advertisement.

      As for OSes, I think the film makers just want to make an impression, so they show something glitz

      • You possibly chose the worst example there, since Dells *are* distinctive, they tend to have metallic style cases with a huge Dell logo embossed on them.

        Someone already mentioned Italian job, where a Dell keeps getting whipped out, theres also Swordfish, where they break into the bank, and show a rack full of Dell servers, which are also distinctive things - once again because of the metallic badge.

  • In anime... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Crayon Kid ( 700279 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @05:49AM (#7326810)

    ...they feature all kinds of operating systems every now and then. Well, maybe not what you'd expect... :) They either go all to way to fantasy land and make up something like they did in Lain [animenfo.com] (which in turn inspired a real life OS interface -- LainOS [sourceforge.net]), or they humorously mimick real life OS -- think "Windaws XXXP" (seen on "Happy Lesson Advance" [animenfo.com]) or "Red Hot Linux" (seen on "Chobits" [animenfo.com]).

  • When Sam Fisher is watching the web broadcast on his PC, he's using GNOME as his desktop.
  • If I was a gambling man, I'd put money that the 7-head terminal in Swordfish was running linux or *bsd. Can windows even handle seven indpendant video outputs at once? Also, the dell laptop ui stan uses in the club looked very much like bash if memory serves.
    • If I was a gambling man, I'd put money that the 7-head terminal in Swordfish was running linux or *bsd.

      You mean the 7 head terminal with all the SGI [sgi.com] logos [okino.com]? Pity you're not a gambling man. (Not that SGI doesn't use Linux, but most of their real, MIPS-based, computers still run Irix.)
    • From the DigitalRoom Multi Monitor Guide (for 98/2K/XP):

      * Each monitor must have its own video card (i.e. 3 monitors would require 3 video cards). The exception being if you have special multi-monitor video cards.

      * Anywhere from 2 - 9 monitors are supported.

      http://www.digitalroom.net/techpub/multimon.html
  • In the video game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Solid Snake uses a computer to upload photos and when he turns it on it's a verbose linux boot.

    Even says "linux" several times, which isn't surprising since it was developed for the PS2 originally. I wonder if it was kept for the XBOX version?

  • Movies like to show 'fake' desktops... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Spoing ( 152917 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @09:46AM (#7327558) Homepage
    Using something that someone might recognize -- and know is wrong -- distracts from the story. Using an atypical desktop or a slide show that fakes it entirely eliminates this.

    That we recognize it is beside the point.

  • Anti-Trust (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nege ( 263655 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @09:54AM (#7327608) Journal
    The Movie Anti-Trust [imdb.com] used Gnome exclusivly throughout the movie. The interfaces that you see that are not the gnome desktop are still running on linux - Miguel de'icaza, credited for have founded the Gnome project, makes a guest appearance in the movie as well, offering some computer science award to Ryan Phillippe.

  • Sphere had several 'long' sequences in which the main characters manipulated and passed commands to a UNIX shell of some type (possibly bash or csh). Its been a while since I've seen this movie, but they definitely were using Unix, and unlike many movies that show a single glimpse of linux, its on the screen for a decent amount of time.

  • Dateline Commercial (Score:2, Informative)

    by iago ( 4917 )
    The commercial for Dateline advertising the interview with Princess Di's Butler, if you look in the upper right hand corner of the screen, you can see a Linux shutdown sequence.

    It looked like RedHat but it was only shown for a few seconds.

  • "The Score" (Score:3, Informative)

    by lawpoop ( 604919 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @11:33AM (#7328406) Homepage Journal
    The geek who was hired by De Niro's character was running linux. In his mom's basement. I remember seeing a penguin, but I don't recall if it was a doll, or a graphic on the screen.

  • Random examples of movie computing (Score:5, Informative)

    by babbage ( 61057 ) <cdeversNO@SPAMcis.usouthal.edu> on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @12:06PM (#7328788) Homepage Journal
    • Obvious references to Linux/Unix/X11 still seem pretty rare to me. Some movies have featured them prominently, but unless the computer is itself part of the plot, the interface is usually made to melt into the background. Here's some examples I can think of where the *nix interface seems obvious:
      • The movie "Hackers" is a standard one to cite here. The movie is really awful, but I'm willing to give it a pass not because of the silly computer displays, but because it has Penn Jillette in a small role, Hal (which automatically scores points for the 2001 reference). And the reason it's cool that Penn is in there is, well, because it's Penn, and he's really "in" on this silly little subculture. Witness his snarky comments on Richard Stallman [pennandteller.com], the comedic potential of the Turing Test [pennandteller.com] and Markov chains [pennandteller.com] ("Mark V. Shaney" -- get it?), the math behind public key encryption [pennandteller.com], and -- most of all -- is chummy with Unix co-designer Rob Pike, and has even pulled pranks on Nobel laureats with him [bell-labs.com]. So, short of putting in someone like Pike, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, or Linus Torvalds, putting Penn Jillette in a geek role in a movie is pretty much close enough for me.
      • "Jurassic Park" had a famous scene where the girl sits down at a terminal, looks things over, then exclaims "This is Unix! I know Unix!". Silly, but then it was real, sort of: the screen shots were of an experimental 3D file manager from SGI. There was probably an xterm open somewhere offcamera or behind the file manager window so that a technician could enter commands in between the GUI clips that made it into the film.
      • There are other examples of Linux in movies, but unfortunately most of the movies are awful (Antitrust, Swordfish, <troll> The Matrix </troll>, etc).
    • As has been noted all over, Macs show up a lot in movies & tv shows. This probably isn't a coincidence: the machines may look nicer than the typical beige box PC, but the product placement was probably paid for [apple.com] (also see here, at the bottom [wired.com]) in most cases, just as it would be for any other identifiable consumer product in a show. That said, random Mac sightings I can think of include:
      • Carrie's laptop in recent seasons of "Sex and the City" is an old black Powerbook G3 running OS9. Before that she had an older Powerbook. She was given a clamshell iBook as a gift when the G3 crashed, but returned it & fixed the Powerbook.
      • Harry Connick Jr's character had a G4 tower & cinema display on his desk in a recent "Will & Grace". The display wasn't up, so no idea what it was running.
      • In the movie "Zoolander", Apples show up all over the place. The funniest example was probably when Ben Stiller & Owen Wilson are told to break into an office & steal some files off someone's iMac: after staring blankly at it for a while, they call for help and are told that the files are "inside the computer". Like wisdom dawning on the apes in 2001, they get the idea -- and start beating on the case trying to break it open and cause the files to spill out.
      • In my favorite example, it has been observed [wired.com] that on the show "24", all the good guys use Macs and all the bad guys use Dells. An awareness of this pattern would have uncovered a turncoat who ended up betraying people at the end of the first season.
    • A lot of shows have hard to identify OSes. Probably on purpose.
      • On "CS
    • The movie "Hackers" is a standard one to cite here. The movie is really awful.

      Aww...come on. Hackers was great! Forgetting for a second the Angelina Jolie factor (which might have made it watchable in and of itself), I actually liked the way they dealt with computers.

      If they'd been 100% accurate about how computers worked, the movie just wouldn't have worked. Even geeks would've been bored watching someone just type commands into a CLI.

      They could've done what other movies did and hire someone who kno

      • I don't describe "Hackers" as awful because I have a problem with willing suspension of disbelief (I mean, I like "Law & Order" in spite of the silly IP addresses, just to give one counterexample). No, I describe "Hackers" as awful because it's a really stupid movie, not meant for anyone more mature than a seventh grade boy.

        It's possible to make a good "hacker" movie. To name the two I can think of, "Sneakers" and "Pi" were both pretty good -- clever, well written & acted, thoroughly enjoyable movi

        • No, I describe "Hackers" as awful because it's a really stupid movie, not meant for anyone more mature than a seventh grade boy.

          Hmmm...not that it's the answer to any of life's important questions, but I liked it. I can definitely think of worse ways to spend a couple of hours.

          "The Matrix" gets passed off as some kind of weighty philosophical tract, but to me it has more in common with junk like "Blade"

          IMHO, the matrix is intro philosophy...the "gateway drug" if you will. It packages what is basical

    • Two notes, in reverse order:

      There was probably an xterm open somewhere offcamera or behind the file manager window so that a technician could enter commands in between the GUI clips that made it into the film.

      On-screen computer activity is, as a rule, never "live". One missed mouse click, one badly-timed BSOD, one random error message, a typo on a hidden xterm or remote prompt, and that's a serious shitload of money down the drain. (Think costs of film, lights, salaries...) It's always done in ad

    • Urm. In most movies, the 'OS' shown, is normally a Flash or similar animation written so that the desired action / input will always be correct, no matter which keys (or mouse movements, etc) are input by the actors. I'm sure this is by no means the only way it is done, but at least for those flashy (crappy) 'HollywoodOS' type shots, it is quite commonly used.
      I'll try and find some references to post here.....

    • As has been noted all over, Macs show up a lot in movies & tv shows. This probably isn't a coincidence: the machines may look nicer than the typical beige box PC, but the product placement was probably paid for [apple.com] (also see here, at the bottom [wired.com]) in most cases, just as it would be for any other identifiable consumer product in a show.

      Actually, in the US product placement on television is prohibited under the FCC sponsorship identification requirements of 47 U.S.C. 317 and 508, and

      • Actually, in the US product placement on television is prohibited under the FCC sponsorship identification requirements of 47 U.S.C. 317 and 508, and 47 C.F.R. 73.1211. My wife used to be Director of Marketing of a well known consumer goods manufacturer. She says that back in her day TV placement for gratis product was already common, but the shows didn't even ask for money, probably more because it devalued advertising slots than because they were afraid of the FCC. Apparently this is no longer the case.

        • I am pretty sure the regs are still on the books. Or at least they were as recently as 2000. That was when the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) filed a complaint with the FCC alleging the broadcast networks were in violation because they accepted Public Service Announcement (PSA) credits from the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) in return for airing anti-drug content in its regular programming. NORML maintained that because the networks did not disclose the compen
    • Likewise, the computer displays on Hal in "2001: A Space Oddyssey" were also just traditional cel animation.
      But the cells were computer generated (by IBM Hursley Park Research Centre). Handling that kind of stuff real time then was out of the question. IBM hoped for a credit but they forgot about putting it in the contract, so the studio pushed them out of the way.
  • FLUKE [amazon.com] by Christopher Moore has a scene where a local geek comes to assist the researchers by writing a computer program for them "in Linux" so its not a great reference in that the author (while IMHO the best working novelist of our time) seems a bit unclear as to what Linux is, it is - I think - a good example of the comprehension of the non-Geek public of the Linux phenomenon. i.e. something coders/computers geeks use as opposed to "normal" computer users.
  • Not linux i dont think, but a MacOS look-alike running on beige boxes. Probably the fullscreen flash thing someone mentioned earlier. MacOS bars, but an hourglass and not a watch while waiting for the file to copy, and he was definitly playing the same version of tetris i had on my old Win 3.1 box in an earlier scene.

  • Wayne's World (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Mr Muppet ( 139986 )
    Not a computer, but didn't Garth in Wayne's World (can't remember if it was 1 or 2) have a book titled Unix Administrator's something-or-other? And I think he even talked to a girl about Unix for a brief second.
    • Not a computer, but didn't Garth in Wayne's World (can't remember if it was 1 or 2) have a book titled Unix Administrator's something-or-other?

      If I remember correctly, it was the ubiquitous "Unix Network Programming" by the equally ubiquitous W. Richard Stevens (RIP). "Look it up in Stevens" is usually the correct answer whenever asked a question about TCP/IP or socket programming in general - if the person asking is smart enough to even understand the answer, it's almost certain they'll already own this
  • If you have a cluster of 1024+ Linux boxen humming in the background, it is REALLY easy to find someone who'd offer a helpful solution to the "Hey, we need a weird+nerdy computer screen here!" problem. ;-)

    Paul B.
  • At the end when Dade is telling Joey where to find the garbage file, he dictates to him a command that is obviously really *NIX-like.

    LK
  • Watched it last night, noticed that the minions in TCU (Jack's daughter, for one) seemed to be running some X-based window manager on Dell desktops. Jack, of course, had a powerbook.

  • Bit late... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Qwell ( 684661 )
    I was just watching the Drew Carey show(an old Episode), where he tries to get a job at what the dept store has become(the .com). They were saying that the only jobs open were tech jobs. Drew said, "I can do tech." They then asked Drew if he could use Linux. He said yes(naturally), and they asked, "Redhat 7.2?" Made me think of this article, thought I'd post it.

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