Ice Age 3 - Created Partly On An XFCE Desktop

When you have a passion or interest in one thing, your attention is drawn to it when you see it. By that I mean those who are interested in PC's, OS's (Operating Systems) etc tend to be drawn towards them when we see them in the background of interviews, TV and movie scenes etc I remember many years ago, the PC on the Daniels family sitting room in the Aussie soap Neighbours was always turned so you never saw the screen. One day the camera panned too far and you saw a Commodore Amiga hand boot screen.

Apple are good at getting their products into props departments, so it's easier for a producer to just use that when they need a "PC" prop for a scene. Apple insist on being paid if the Apple logo is visible, which is why many movie and TV shows use Macs but the logo is always obscured somehow. In the case of DVD extras interviews with the people who worked on a movie, they're often interviewed at their desk, where they can demo some of the behind the scenes stuff. Part of this is computer animation.

Traditionally major movie studios have been very Mac OSX centric environments for the creative parts of the process, the visual and audio designers. They have long used Linux or Unix render farms to do the grunt work in producing the finished article we see on screen. It's a rare sector that even Windows can't get a toe into. So imagine my surprise when I saw this.

Linux & Unix are so versatile that it's often difficult to tell which distro or even DE (Desktop Environment) or WM (Window Manager) it is, unless you look for little clues. For those who don't know, the XFCE panel and menu are the giveaway on the bottom of the screen. The XFCE logo is the little black mouse on the blue X. A comparison of other XFCE desktops can be found on the XFCE project home page. XFCE is a Desktop Environment of course, not an Operating System, but the presence of XFCE means that it's some form of Linux or Unix that it's running on. I can't tell which. Chances are it's either Sun's Solaris or RedHat Enterprise Linux. It's worth noting that this is on 3 separate desktops.

This is not a single lone freedom crusader in a proprietary world. It's also worth noting that it's a mixed environment, where they also use Mac OSX. I have no idea which animation application they're using, whether it's open source or not, but the mere fact that a top Hollywood animation studio is using Linux or Unix in the design process of a major movie project is a huge deal. Every avalanche begins with one snowball.