Impress Your Friends with This Fake Hollywood Hacker Terminal

In Hollywood movies, hacking always seems interesting, especially because the whole action is spiced up with fancy desktop environments/backgrounds, rapidly uncontrolled typing (with loud typing noise/keystrokes) and rapid scrolling of command output on colorful terminals.

Read Also: 20 Useful Terminal Emulators for Linux

To make it all seem real, the hackers normally keep on explaining real-world hacking concepts (and mentioning used tools/commands) while breaking into computer systems or networks and the action gets done in a matter of seconds or minutes, which is far different from the practical real-world scenario.

However, if you want to get a feel of hacking in the movies, easily on your Linux console, then you need to install the Hollywood terminal emulator: developed by Canonical’s Dustin Kirkland.

Watch how Hollywood Terminal works:

This terminal emulator produces Hollywood melodrama technobabble in your byobu console. In this article, we will show you how to setup the byubo console and Hollywood movies hackers’ terminal emulator in Ubuntu and it’s derivatives such as Linux Mint, Kubuntu etc.

First, add the appropriate repository to your system software sources, then update the packages’ sources list and finally install the packages as follows:

$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:hollywood/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install byobu hollywood

To launch Hollywood terminal type:

$ hollywood

To stop it, simply press [Ctrl+C] to kill the hollywood script itself, then type exit to quit the byobu console.

To set the number of splits to divide your screen, use the -s flag.

$ hollywood -s 4

You can turn off the theme song, using -q flag like this.

$ hollywood -q

You might also like to read these following related articles on Linux Terminal.

1. Terminator – A Terminal Emulator to Manage Multiple Terminal Windows on Linux
2. Terminix – A New GTK 3 Tiling Terminal Emulator for Linux
3. Shell In A Box – A Web-Based SSH Terminal to Access Remote Linux Servers
4. Nautilus Terminal – An Embedded Terminal for Nautilus File Browser in GNOME
5. Guake – A Drop-Down Terminal for Gnome Desktops
6. GoTTY – Share Your Linux Terminal (TTY) as a Web Application

That’s all. Hope you find this interesting but remember real life hacking is complicated, you need to take time to learn, understand and penetrate operating systems or applications and beyond.

If you know of any similar fancy command line utilities out there, do share with us including any other thoughts about this article, via the feedback form below.