We all know that Hollywood movies are the worst place to see some accurate depiction of anything from real life and that includes computer terminals. Well, there is a solution for that now and we can only hope that some misguided producer will see the new "hollywood" package made for this exact purpose.

Hollywood movie producers invest a lot of time and money in custom interfaces and GUIs that don't really do anything, but they think they’re nice and interesting on film. Most of the time, someone is hacking away by typing frenetically while windows with crazy stuff open and close. This is why this kind of image is now seared into the public's consciousness and hacking looks more exciting than in real life. It isn't.

First of all, no one could possibly follow what's happening on those screens and it would be the most inefficient way of doing things, but for the sake of a cool shot film directors go to extreme lengths. A developer figured out that you can do the same thing but in reverse. Why not make the current terminal and apps work act like they do in the movies, with no functionality whatsoever? Instead of having the movies faking real-life hacking, we now have real-life faking movies stuff.

Hollywood Technodrama is describing the app perfectly

Developer Dustin Kirkland, who also happens to be Canonical's Cloud Solutions Product Manager in his free time, had some time on his hand and ended up doing this project. The result is something mesmerizing, fun, and completely useless.

"You've all seen the high stakes hacking scene, packed with techno-babble and dripping in drama. And the command and control center with dozens of over-sized monitors, overloaded with scrolling text... I was stuck on a plane a few weeks back, traveling home from Las Vegas, and the in flight WiFi was down. I know, I know. Real world problems. Suddenly, I had 2 hours on my hands, without access to email, IRC, or any other distractions."

"It's at this point I turned to my folder of unfinished ideas, and cherry-picked one that would take just a couple of fun hours to hack. And I'm pleased to introduce the fruits of that, um, labor -- the hollywood package for Ubuntu :-) Call it an early Christmas present!" wrote Dustin on this blog.

How to install the hollywood package

The Ubuntu 15.04 users will find all the necessary packages in the repositories, but if you have other Ubuntu versions, then you will need to enter a few commands in a terminal near you: