Linux in Movies?

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?"

Comments

Mexcian movie, Nicotina, used KDE

[Adrian De Leon]

I went to saw Nicotina 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 :-)

Movies like to show 'fake' desktops...

[Spoing]

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.

Random examples of movie computing

[babbage]

• 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, the comedic potential of the Turing Test and Markov chains ("Mark V. Shaney" -- get it?), the math behind public key encryption, and -- most of all -- is chummy with Unix co-designer Rob Pike, and has even pulled pranks on Nobel laureats with him. 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 (also see here, at the bottom) 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 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