Search for Life: The Drake Equation

Spotted an old KDE desktop on a workstation on the "Search for Life: The Drake Equation" (presented by scientific dullard Dallas Cambell) on a multi-monitor workstation searching for extra-terrestrial radio waves (SETI). I'd guess it's most likely Red Hat. Notice the boot-up screen in the last screenshot, KDE panel in the 4th screenshot and the KDE logout/shutdown screen in the 6th screenshot. At the moment the documentary is available to watch on BBC iPlayer here, skip to about 50 mins in to see this.

Behind The Scenes at WETA

ZDNet has a good article on the making of Avatar by WETA showing some KDE 3.x desktops running Maya.

Asteroids - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Shown recently on BBC Four, as usual when they visit NASA Linux/UNIX dominates with a few Macs and an occasional Windows box.


At about 23 minutes there's a simple Dell dual-monitor setup...















...running what looks like Red Hat possibly, judging by the theme...

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At 23 minutes we see what looks to me like a Debian desktop
















Then at 36:56 there's Andy Rivkin's (John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory) nice dual monitor Linux desktop (and a Macbook):





























You can still at the time of writing watch the programme on BBC iPlayer here.

A little round-up of Linux on the big and small screen

Linux spotted in Criminal Minds, season 3, episode 9:




An interesting looking KDE4 (?) desktop appearing in the movie Machete,


























An OSX-aping Linux desktop in the season premier of Supernatural
















Also if you haven't seen it already there's also Iron Man using KDE 3.5 and the 'top' command being used in Tron trailer

‘The Glades’ – detectives run GNOME on a Windows-branded PC

OMG!Ubuntu! reader Benedict ‘the.abyzz’ Mueller has spotted a Gnome desktop on a series called The Glades. Read more on the OMG!Ubuntu! site

Visions of The Future

Watch out for the repeats of Michi Kaku's Visions of The Future on BBC4 in the next few weeks, on Mondays at 7:30pm and on BBC iPlayer. I've blogged about various appearances of Linux on the program before.

Ubuntu: The Gadget Show (Season 13 Episode 8)

I just watched the latest episode of the Gadget Show and spotted an Ubuntu desktop during the pool playing challenge, as Ortis Deeley took on a pool champion using gadgets. One of the gadgets is a device to show you how to play shots using projectors hooked up to a PC with an app called ARPool - Augmented Reality Pool. At the moment you can still watch the episode on DemandFive (UK only). It's using the Clearlooks theme and you can see the Ubuntu logo on the menu in the top left of the screen.

The Sky At Night - Extraterrestrial Life - Is Anybody Out There?

I was watching an episode of The Sky at Night yesterday morning, on the search for extraterrestrial life using SETI and SETI@Home and spotted several Linux desktops/laptops. It's an old episode from around a year ago, I reckon, but interesting none-the-less. I also found the episode on YouTube in two parts. It's hard to see what the PC's running in the first clip, skip to 5:25 in the second video for some good views of Linux PCs, running quite old versions of KDE. Reminds me of when I used to use KDE 3, good times. This was before I started to have instability problems in Kubuntu which made me switch to Gnome on Ubuntu. See screenshots.

Horizon - Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?

It's been awhile, but I just spotted a nice Linux desktop on the documentary series Horizon "Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?" Sasha Kaslinsky, the scientist whose discovered the theory of "Dark flow" has a nice dual monitor desktop with what is most likely Red Hat (you can tell by the icons) running on a Dell workstation, at his office at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre.


Screenshots:


compiling a map?


Dual monitors and Kaslinsky himself:


Another close-up shot of desktop

Watch on BBC iplayer.

or jump to kaslinsky's linux desktop

Ubuntu Spotted On Doctor Who Set

An eagle-eyed blogger, "Popey" has spotted Ubuntu running on some PC monitors on the Doctor Who set in Dr Who Confidential, apparently all linked to one machine. And Torchwood uses ubuntu too :)