Unix in Tron: Legacy

Nowadays is usual to see Linux and Unix terminals in films. Maybe, you can remember It's a Unix system in Jurassic Park, or KDE desktop environment in Heroes.

So today it was released Tron: Legacy's trailer, the sequel film to the much loved Tron movie from the 80s. It features some of the old actors, including Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner. At the beginning of the trailer, a touch screen is seen. The screen has some windows, and some of the blurred characters were familiar to me.

 

Well, yes. The window at the bottom shows the output of the "top" command. This utility is a common Unix program. It's used by sysadmins to know the programs running on the operating system, memory used, etc. ksoftirqd and watchdog can be seen running

This is an actual screenshot of top running in Ubuntu:

The window right above the "top" one shows other interesting information. In this terminal, the system describes itself as "[Solar?] OS 4.0.1 Generic_50203....um4 i386 Unknown.Unknown". Apparently, has two hard disks, sda and sdb. So the CPU is Intel x86-compatible (i386).

Question is, could it be Solaris, a common Linux distribution or a fake mix?

PS: April 4th, 2011. One year after I wrote this entry there is a lot of information by one of the authors of Tron Legacy digital effects:

«I spent a half year writing software art to generate special effects for Tron Legacy, working at Digital Domain with Bradley "GMUNK" Munkowitz, Jake Sargeant, and David "dlew" Lewandowski. This page has taken a long time to be published because I've had to await clearance. A lot of my team's work was done using Adobe software and Cinema 4D. The rest of it got written in C++ using OpenFrameworks and wxWidgets, the way I've always done it with this team [...] In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t.».

Comments

[laZZy admin]

So TRON is UNIX based system, I KNEW IT ;-D
Let's hope we'll see some "believable" scenes with computer usage in this movie.
Something like when Trinity was hacking usin nmap and some exploits in Matrix Reloaded.

Can hardly wait.

[Joe]

Looks faked. Looks like it says Sun4m i386. Sun4m's used a SPARC CPU, not an Intel.

[irritant]

It is definitely faked. It seems they dressed up a Linux system to look like Solaris running on a SPARC machine. A dead giveaway is the appearance of top's output, which looks like this in Linux but not other UNIX-like OSes. Also the running xorg, which wasn't ported to Solaris at the time that Kevin Flynn disappeared into the grid. I am taking this from the discussion of the trailer found

[rvr]

irritant: Interesting.

The actual film has more shots about this. Kevin's son plays with this console and type some commands.

[gfgdfgd]

Solaris doen't name it's disks sda och sdb, or sd* anything.

[CoolGuy1985]

freaking computer geeeks...jeeez....

[Daniel Koerber]

After watching the movie, I noticed some very recognizable commands, such as grep, and kill.

[Guru]

Apperently after the commands u get a whole lot of biblical terms.. see for your self...

[Dennis]

Since Encom released the Flynn / Encom OS 12(?) in the movie, I assume this OS being the 20 years older version 4.0.1 of it - based on Unix. I guess the rest is "just" great artwork. Unfortunately, this kind of skin looks quite ugly on real Linuces while having some non-cli programs running alongside, as you usually have in daily life.

Nice scene however. Disney seems to be aware of us guys analyzing such scenes ; ) At least this way it feels a bit more realistic than the original Tron.

[FTFY]

Solaris is not a "Linux distribution"; Solaris is Unix, not Linux.

[FTFY]

My mistake, I read your article as calling Solaris a Linux distribution, I now see that it was meant as (1) Solaris, (2) a common Linux distribution, (3) a mix of both. I stand corrected.

Cheers.