Lately, I’ve been noticing stories about how to use Linux you need to know half-a-hundred Linux shell commands and the like. Ah, what century are you from? Today, if you can see a window and handle a mouse, you’re ready to use Linux.

And no, I’m not talking about how we’re all already using Linux in devices like the TiVo or the Droid smartphone and through Linux-powered Web sites like Google. I’m talking about using Linux on the desktop.

There is nothing — I repeat, nothing — that requires any special knowledge to use Linux on the desktop today. If you’ve already mastered Windows XP, you’ll have little more trouble moving to a Linux desktop like Red Hat’s Fedora 12; Novell’s openSUSE 11.2; or Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.10 than you would in switching over to Windows 7.

I’m not saying using Linux isn’t different from running Windows. It is. For example, you’ll need special software like Crossover Linux to run Windows-specific software.

The interfaces also aren’t the same — but then, Windows 7 and Vista’s interfaces aren’t the same as XP’s, and Mac OS X’s Aqua interface doesn’t look anything like the others. Besides, can any other operating system besides Linux let you set up the interface so that it duplicates XP’s look and feel? I think not!

What you don’t need to use desktop Linux is to learn dozens of obscure Linux shell (aka command line) programs to get work done. Neither do you need to know how to edit configuration files by hand to get Linux set up properly.

Sure, it can help to know how to use the Unix/Linux shell. I was writing shell (awk, sed, and grep) scripts to get work done in Unix, and later Linux, before many of you played your first game of solitaire on Windows 1.0. My point is, for ordinary, everyday use, you don’t need to know anymore about those things than you need to know how to edit Windows’ registry to run Windows.

I use desktop Linux every day, and I’m a Linux expert. Do you know how often I turn to a terminal to get to a shell to run commands? Maybe once a month, if that.

Between the two major Linux desktop interfaces, KDE and GNOME, Linux has you covered. For applications, many of the most popular applications, such as Firefox and OpenOffice, run just the same on Linux as they do on Windows. For other end-user programs, Linux programs such as Evolution for e-mail and Pidgin for IM are just as good, if not better, than their Windows equivalents. And again, you don’t need to know anything special to use them.

Installing new software on Linux isn’t any trouble either. Better still, major Linux distributors like Ubuntu are continuing to make installing Linux software easier than ever with programs like Ubuntu Software Center.

Don’t get me wrong: if you’re running a Linux server, you really need to know Linux’s technical guts. But you know what? If you’re running a Windows server, you also need to know Window’s version of the shell, the PowerShell.

No matter what desktop operating system you’re running, if you really want control over exactly what it does, you need to know how to manage its command line tools. But for day-to-day use, Linux’s graphical interfaces makes it just as easy to use as Windows or Mac OS X. Pretending that you need to be some kind of computer wizard to run Linux on the desktop today is just downright silly.

July 8 (Bloomberg) — Google Inc., owner of the most- visited Internet search engine, is developing a computer operating system based on its Chrome Web browser, taking aim at Microsoft Corp. in its strongest market.

The system will be designed at first for low-cost laptops called netbooks, Google said in a blog post. The company is in talks with partners on the project and computers running the software will be available in the second half of 2010.

The plan escalates Google’s rivalry with Microsoft, which extends to Web search, browsers and business applications such as word processing and spreadsheets. Windows, Microsoft’s flagship product, runs about 90 percent of the world’s personal computers. Google is also trying to spur Web-ad sales after reporting its first sequential revenue drop as a public company.

“There is a possibility that the new OS can break the paradigm Microsoft and Intel created over the past 20 years,” said Yukihiko Shimada, a computer analyst at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities Co. in Tokyo. “There is plenty of business opportunity for Google in this market.”

Google said it’s working with computer makers to introduce a number of netbooks next year, without identifying any of the companies. The Chrome OS will be open-source, meaning the program code will be open to developers, Google said. The software will work on top of the Linux operating system.

Netbook Competition

Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, declined to comment. Windows accounted for 28 percent of the company’s $60.4 billion annual revenue in the 12 months ended June 30, 2008.

Microsoft has stepped up its efforts in the netbook market. It said in May it plans to remove a restriction of running three applications at a time on its forthcoming Windows 7 Starter Edition, which is designed for netbooks. The announcement eliminated one of the most significant differences between the basic edition of the operating system and a pricier one.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, rose $2.61 to $399.24 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading at 9:32 a.m. New York time. Microsoft fell 22 cents $22.31. Before today, Google had risen 29 percent this year and Microsoft had added 16 percent.

Online Strategy

The Chrome OS is consistent with Google’s focus on getting people to use software online, which contrasts with Microsoft’s approach of providing programs on the computer itself. Google started offering business software in 2007, allowing users to access spreadsheets and word-processing documents via the Web, just as anyone might access the search engine or Google News.

“We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better,” Google said. “The operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no Web.”

Google is trying to encourage people to spend more time online to fuel demand for Internet ads, which accounted for more than 90 percent of its 2008 revenue of $21.8 billion. In the first quarter of this year, Google had its first sequential sales drop since it went public in 2004 as the recession prompted companies to curb advertising spending.

The open-source Chrome OS will probably win over companies that don’t want to pay for Windows, said Jim Friedland, an analyst at Cowen & Co. in New York. The system may also help Google sell Web-based applications, such as the Gmail e-mail service, that run on top of it, he said.

“They really haven’t cracked the enterprise yet,” said Friedland, who rates Google’s shares “outperform” and doesn’t own any. “We’ve seen some inroads around the edges.”

‘More Options’

Computer makers such as Acer Inc. and Asustek Computer Inc. already have plans to offer computers running Android, an open- source operating system backed by Google and initially designed for mobile phones. Acer, the world’s second-largest laptop maker, said last month it plans to release a low-cost notebook powered by Android. Asustek Computer has also developed a netbook that runs on Google’s software.

“Having another OS or another interface does create more options, and with the weight of the Google name behind it, does lift its prominence,” said Bryan Ma, a computer analyst at IDC in Singapore.

Google said that while the Chrome OS is separate from Android, the two will overlap in some areas. The Chrome operating system is designed to save users from having to deal with viruses and security updates, Google said.

“Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the Web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems,” Google said. “While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.”

‘Beneficial to Users’

Tony Chen, chief operating officer of Asustek’s notebook unit said by phone the company will consider “anything that’s beneficial to users.” Fujitsu Ltd. spokeswoman Nozomi Endo said the company will monitor market conditions before deciding whether to introduce products using Google’s operating system.

Faith Brewitt, a Dell Inc. spokeswoman, and Hewlett-Packard Co. spokeswoman Liana Teo didn’t answer calls to their Singapore offices. Spokespeople for Acer, Sony Corp., Samsung Electronics Co., NEC Corp., Panasonic Corp., and Toshiba Corp., declined to comment.

The Chrome OS — which will run on traditional Intel Corp.- based x86 chips along with semiconductors designed by ARM Holdings Plc — will work on lightweight netbooks along with more powerful computers, including desktop PCs, Google said.

Google’s Chrome still faces an uphill battle against Microsoft’s browser. Chrome, which was unveiled last year, had 1.2 percent market share in February, compared with 67 percent for Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer, according to research firm Net Applications, which tracks Web statistics.

In May, Microsoft introduced a search engine called Bing that has enhanced shopping, travel and sorting features. Bing’s market share climbed to more than 10 percent in June, according to Comscore Inc.

Google’s search engine is No. 1 in the U.S., holding more than 60 percent market share. Microsoft is No. 3, according to ComScore.

Linux will be a passenger in every seat on Qantas’ Airbus A380s aeroplanes. All of the airline’s superjumbos – the first of which will commence flying next week – will have their in flight entertainment systems powered by the operating system.

The A380 is the first Qantas aircraft to utilise the Panasonic eX2 Inflight Entertainment System (IFE).

All of Panasonic’s X Series of IFE systems run on Linux.

And Qantas is not limiting it to the A380s. The systems will feature in Qantas’ next batch of B737-800 aircraft (which will use the Panasonic eFX system) for both its Business and Economy customers, due in March 2009; its B787 or ‘Dreamliner’ aircraft also due next year; and on some of its older but soon-to-be revamped B767-300 fleet.

The eX2 powers many of the world’s leading airlines’ IFE. For example, Singapore Airlines already operates the eX2 on its A380s, B747 and B777 aircraft while Emirates will carry the same system on its batch of almost 60 A380 aircraft. It is believed two-thirds of the carriers who have placed orders for A380 aircraft will operate the eX2 IFE.

Qantas has said the IFE in the A380 aircraft will feature 17in touch screens that come equipped with noise cancelling headsets and video on demand options.

“Our system is state of the art and offers over 1000 entertainment options including everything from the latest release movies to our Lonely Planet destinational information as well as our tail mounted panoramic camera,” said John Borghetti, executive general manager at Qantas in a recent Web forum.

According to an article in Avionics Today, the A380 is the industry’s first one-gigabit backbone system, and will deliver something in the order of 5Mbps of data to the seat.

“That amount of bandwidth will provide not only high-quality video but concurrent capabilities like picture-in-picture, live text news and text messaging,” said Neil James, director of corporate sales and marketing for Panasonic Avionics.

Qantas Flight QF 93 which departs Melbourne for Los Angeles on October 20 will be the airline’s first commercial flight with the new aeroplane.

Linux is beginning to find its legs as the foundation in many different technologies and in the process is fueling a feedback loop that is helping accelerate the operating system’s popularity.

As more and more people contribute from areas such as mobile, data center power management, and real-time technologies, innovations are coming rapid fire and when folded into the Linux kernel provide benefits across a wide spectrum.

For example, power management features for the data center are being tapped to help extend battery life in Linux-based mobile devices.

The evidence of the cooperation will be on display at next week’s LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco.

(Disclosure; IDG, the parent company of both Network World and PC World, also operates LinuxWorld.)

The conference is expected to draw 10,000 attendees to nearly 100 sessions and 200 exhibitor booths. In addition, there is a mini-conference on Mobile Linux, the Linux Garage that will highlight the latest embedded-Linux gadgets, an install fest to benefit San Francisco-area schools, an open source voting demonstration and the annual Penguin Bowl that will pit teams dedicated to mobile Linux and server Linux.

“When you look at how people use technology — embedded systems, mobile computing, mobile internet devices, servers, super computing — in almost every aspect of technology Linux is emerging as the dominant platform,” says Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation.

Of course, Windows still enjoys healthy unit-shipment leads on servers and client systems.

But Zemlin says as Linux use has increased it is fueling a positive feedback loop due to its community development roots.

“When a Wall Street trading application developer uses real-time Linux or when the Defense Department is creating real-time technology for robust embedded defense systems, that same technology gets contributed back to the Linux kernel and it might benefit mobile phone developers by offering the tools to create more stability.”

While the feedback loop isn’t new, Zemlin says it is getting rocket fuel from the growing legions of Linux developers.

In the past two years, he says, 3,200 developers have contributed to the Linux kernel. In one year alone, 1,762 unique kernel contributions were logged and there are 2,000 lines of code written every day.

The Linux kernel has a release every two and a half months and a new Linux distribution release every six months.

“We are seeing this incredibly unique cross pollinization of innovation,” Zemlin says.

Bill Weinberg, an analyst and consultant with LinuxPundit, and the chair of the LinuxWorld Mobile conference, says the discussion goes beyond just Linux as a platform. “We’ve had a lot of hand-wringing around fragmentation in the past,” he says.

This year, Weinberg has added a track on applications, which has been an historical weak spot for the operating system. “How do you create applications for mobile and embedded Linux, how do you to go to market with Linux systems, how are they received by the eco-system, how do ISVs actually make money with apps, and how do operators roll out new services and deploy apps to support their business models,” said Weinberg.

Motorola will talk about the LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation, which began 18 months ago, and Intel will detail its mobile Atom Processor and Moblin.org, which is focused on creating Internet-centric mobile applications. A panel will convene to discuss how the two can interact and interoperate.

Weinberg also is augmenting the discussion with a track to cover cross-over topics such as virtualization in embedded systems. He says virtualization provides the functional separator that allows embedded application developers choice of platform depending on what they are trying to accomplish.

“There is no single platform that has a single code base that covers as many different kinds of applications and niches as Linux does,” says Weinberg.

Some analysts say Linux has without a doubt become a more mainstream solution.

“Linux is expanding its presence in other workloads as it continues to hold down key success areas in Web and infrastructure roles,” says Al Gillen, an analyst with IDC.

“Customers are increasingly using it for business-critical workloads.”

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth (who we interviewed last year) announced that he’s out to make Linux a better-looking operating system than Mac OS X—within two years. An ambitious goal! At O’Reilly’s OSCON conference this week, Shuttleworth said:

“I think the great task in front of us in the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something stable and usable and not pretty, to something that’s art,” Shuttleworth said. “Think of the way the iPhone uses a pure software experience, it abstracts away all the hardware,” he said. “You can paint anything on the screen because it’s all software.”

Everyone loves eye candy on their desktop—Apple’s record-setting Mac sales can attest to that—but is looks is the main hurdle for Linux adoption amongst Normals? Seems like the inability to run Windows and Mac-only software like Microsoft Office or Outlook/Entourage natively, and niggly problems like Wi-Fi and video driver incompatibilities are the biggest problems. What about you? Would a better-looking Linux make you switch? Or is it deeper than that?

Ensuring your servers stamp as small a carbon footprint as possible on the earth and in your data center can encompass everything from making sure they are shipped in recyclable packaging to hiring an analyst who can predict the total life-cycle environmental impact.

For this test, we examined power consumption as a way to judge whether Windows Server 2008 or Linux is, in fact, the ‘greener’ operating system. As the price of power hits record heights, power reduction mechanisms shipping within an operating system should play a key role in you energy conservation plan.

Our tests point to Linux as the winner of the green flag by margins that topped out at 12%. But we must note that our results are full of stipulations imposed by our test bed, and as the more truthful car advertisements might warn — your wattage may vary.

We ran multiple power consumption tests using Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.1 and SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 SP1 on four, popular 1U server machines, one each from Dell and IBM and two from HP. The results showed that while Windows Server 2008 drew slightly less power in a few test cases when it had its maximum power saving settings turned on, it was RHEL that did the best job of keeping the power draw in check across the board.

The variable settings allowed by both Windows and Linux – which let you toggle between having a high energy efficient server vs. a high performing one – can certainly have an impact on overall server consumption. But again, your mileage will also vary given the workloads you place on your servers and whether or not you’re using popular virtual machine hypervisors to support multiple operating system instances on the same physical server (see related story).

The edge in either test category will likely not last as operating systems become more finely tuned to work in lockstep with advanced server chipsets, and as additional coding techniques that more closely tie operating systems and applications to power considerations take hold across the industry.

Part of the current “green” operating system difficulty lies in the disconnect between how an operating system and its applications can be optimized to let the underlying system quiet itself down to a lower power-consuming state while at the same time not sacrificing the ability to react to servicing application (and therefore system and user) needs.

In our testing, we found that the CPU ‘throttle-back’ mechanism – the main technique for how an operating system can aid in reducing a server’s energy draw — requires new firmware and updated drivers that specifically support that feature. Only the IBM x3550 and the HP DL-360 G5 arrived ready for optimal power conservation. The HP DL-160 and Dell 1950 servers required several updates throughout our six-week test period to accommodate the CPU throttling features of Windows 2008 and Linux.

We truly know from the trenches that it really isn’t easy getting your servers to be green.
CPU conservation

No matter the operating system, Windows or Linux, the leading form of power conservation comes from throttling back the CPU to let the server rest during quiet activity times. Spinning down hard disks to a quieter state is the other major power-saving setting available to Windows servers.

Even though Linux desktop distrobutions can use the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) specification, which is designed for laptops, rather than servers, that feature was not implemented by Red Hat or SUSE for the servers we tested.

Some chipsets are designed for throttle-back, while others (especially older ones, predating 2007) always work at full pace and power full time. Only in the past three years have processors shipped from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Via Technology, and others in the x86 family have been specifically designed to cycle between fast (and higher power consuming) and slow (power savings) states.

The systems used in our testing ship with Intel Xeon multi-core CPUs, which can support throttle-back (manifested by slowing down the CPU clock so that the power strobes through the CPU more slowly against the slowed clock); but as we stated earlier the server’s BIOS and firmware must be sufficiently upgraded to correctly supported this. The IBM x3550 and HP DL-160 house a single quad-core CPU (of different models, see How we did it), while the Dell 1950 and HP DL360G5 each housed two quad-core CPUs for a total of eight cores.

Once throttled back, the millions of transistors in CPUs can turn back on almost spontaneously at virtually the speed of the CPU (we could detect no latency issues in our testing), and can throttle-back down at nearly the same speed. The throttle back condition can save quite a bit of power in the four systems we tested, but most other electronics within the system remain on and therefore continue to consume power. Because the system must be ready to service application requests, it must have at minimum, some electronics running to monitoring application, user, network and other peripheral service requests. This minimal amount of power drawn is what you see measured in our quiescent state (sometimes referred to as minimal ready-state) results.

Operating systems must allow a CPU to throttle back to this minimal ready state, to be considered green from the power consumption perspective, and both Linux and Windows allow for this. However, there is a ‘tickless’ version of Linux on the horizon that may prove to have power savings characteristics. System interrupt ticks are ‘time slices’ that the operating system uses to queue activities, and they’ve been traditionally set in the past half dozen plus years to a 1,000 ticks per second, each of which serves as an interruption to the CPU. A tickless version of the Linux kernel now reportedly exists that interrupts the CPU less frequently, but was not part of the Linux distribution kernels we tested — although that addition is planned in future editions of Red Hat and SUSE.

This week’s release of the Fedora 9 Linux distribution makes putting a full-fledged desktop on a portable USB thumb drive a three-click affair. Even better, you don’t need Linux installed to create it, you can leave the data on your thumb drive untouched, and any files you create or settings you tweak remain in place the next time you boot up. After the jump, let’s create a fully-functional desktop-to-go using a simple Windows program and a 1GB or larger thumb drive.
Why Fedora?
Turning a live CD ISO into a bootable USB image has been possible for some time now, but it usually involves some heavy lifting with the command line, and almost always in Linux. Fedora’s liveusb-creator program makes USB imaging dead simple, and the Fedora distribution itself has a lot going for it. The latest “community” version of Red Hat’s Linux package benefits from the same updates to the GNOME desktop that Ubuntu’s Hardy Heron includes, and KDE fans get a pretty full-featured version that runs on the customizable KDE 4. You can see a full list of updates and improvements to Fedora 9 here, but it’s best to check it out for yourself. Here’s how.

Make your live USB
First we’ll need to grab Fedora’s liveusb-creator tool by grabbing the zip file listed under “Download,” extracting it and running the liveusb-creator.exe file found inside in Windows.

The top options on the window let you choose to use a live Fedora CD image you’ve already downloaded or have the tool grab a copy of the standard Fedora 9 disc itself. If you’d rather grab the file yourself or download it through a torrent, use one of the links listed under “live media” at the Fedora Project. Plug in your USB drive if you haven’t already, and make sure it’s selected in the “Target” field. Don’t worry about files you’ve got on there—as long as the tool has space to put Fedora on there, it won’t touch your other files.

The slider to the right is the most important part—”Persistent Overlay” is the space on the thumb drive you want to use for storing your files and settings. The Fedora system itself is going to take up roughly the size of a stuffed CD; using an empty 1GB thumb drive, I chose 205MB for the overlay, which left 63MB free, but you can scale that up for larger drives or down if you want more free space. Keep in mind that any files you store on the drive itself can be accessed from inside your USB-booted system, so a bigger persistent overlay isn’t always necessary.

Hit “Create Live USB,” and watch the creator do its thing. Once it’s done, your stick is probably ready to get plugged in and booted up.
Fix booting problems
I say “probably” because there’s a chance, especially if you’ve done some formatting or other live-booting experiments, that you’ll get an error at boot-up stating there’s “No partition active” or something similar. If that’s the case, head to your Start menu’s “Run” command (“Start search” box in Vista), type in diskpart and hit Enter. You’ll get a “DISKPART>” command prompt, where you should follow these commands to mark your USB drive as “active.”

Now you should be set to boot into Fedora 9. You’ll see a splash screen counting down from 10 when you boot (hit Enter twice to speed it up), and you’ll land at a desktop that’s pretty much a fresh Fedora 9 install. You can access to your USB drive’s files from here, connect to a wired or wireless network with the icon in the upper-right system tray, and you’ve got a solid set of built-in applications—Firefox 3 Beta 5, the GIMP, Pidgin, the Transmission BitTorrent client, and a pretty nifty Bluetooth manager, to name a few.

Want to add Thunderbird or OpenOffice.org? Head to the upper-left menus and click to System->Administration->Add/Remove Programs. Anything you install goes into your “persistent overlay,” so as long as you’ve got space for it, you can add whatever you’d like.

Now it’s time to explore and get familiar with a GNOME-based Linux system (or KDE 4, depending on which image you grabbed). Here are a few suggestions on helpful tweaks you might want to make once you’re set up:

* nable your NTFS drives: If you’ve loaded a USB Fedora on a system with Windows installed, you’ll want to open up Add/Remove Programs, search for “ntfs-config,” and install that package. From the System menu again, choose NTFS Config, and you can select the drives you want to have access to.
* Sync data with your Windows apps: Once you can see your NTFS drives on your desktop, you can use your established settings in Firefox 3, Thunderbird, Pidgin, and other apps if you’re booting on the same system as Windows. Check out our guide to dual-booting with shared data; if you’re using Firefox 2 in Windows and only want to replicate bookmarks in Fedora, the GMarks synchronizer has updated to support versions 3 and 2.
* Turn off annoying system sounds: One misstep Fedora makes, at least in my opinion, is enabling by default a slew of little chirps and whistles every time you click or do something. To silence them, head to System-Preferences->Hardware->Sound, click the “System” tab, and un-check the “Enable system sounds” box.

You’ve now got a portable system that’s great for rescuing un-bootable computers, bringing your favorite work apps on the go, or just testing out Linux with realistic performance and custom options. What apps and tweaks have you made to your own live USB system? Share your tips, and questions, in the comments.

Kevin Purdy, associate editor at Lifehacker, wrote this feature from inside his USB drive. His weekly feature, Open Sourcery, appears every Friday on Lifehacker.

Unison is offering a unified communications suite of e-mail, messaging and VoIP as an alternative to Exchange and Outlook.

Software developer Unison has launched what it claims is the world’s first fully-unified communications suite based on Linux.

Announced at CeBIT, the suite (also simply called Unison) combines IP telephony, e-mail and instant messaging with diary, address book and presence capabilities, all in a single Linux server. It is available free as a public beta.

“You can get all these elements separately on Linux, but this is the first time they have all been in one server,” said Rurik Bradbury, Unison’s chief marketing officer. Other unified communications (UC) schemes, such as Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS) can require three or more servers to do the same thing, he added.

“If you’re reasonably familiar with Linux, you can deploy Unison in a couple of hours, and have a complete system running for a company of perhaps 50 or 60 people in half a day,” he said.

The server software works with a Unison client program for Windows PCs. This provides a genuine alternative to Microsoft’s combination of Exchange and Outlook, Bradbury claimed.

“We’re amazed no-one has done this before — build both a client and a server. Others have either one or the other,” he said. He added that a Linux version of the client will come later this year.

Unison is aimed at 20- to 300-seat organizations, but the US-based company plans to add server clustering in the future to support more. It is partly based on open source technology, such as Thunderbird for email and Jabber for instant messaging, and partly developed by Unison’s own programmers.

The software is initially offered as a free beta version but is already fit for use, Bradbury claimed.

“It is almost finished — it is relatively stable software,” he said, joking that he uses commercial software that’s less robust.

Once the beta program is complete there will be a free “community” version for up to 20 users, and per-user or perpetual licences will be sold for larger systems, although pricing for those is not yet fixed.

A Linux-based production pipeline is a perfect choice for a major motion picture like The Spiderwick Chronicles, with its many goblins and magical creatures. Hollywood has been the realm of Linux since 1997, when the movie Titanic proved that Linux can do big computer graphics jobs like rendering a sinking ocean liner. With an industry tradition of using UNIX-based operating systems for high-computation jobs, and due to the better, faster, cheaper nature of Linux, every major effects or animation movie today is produced using Linux. Visual effects facilities ILM and Tippett Studio each created visual effects for Spiderwick. Having multiple effects houses work on the same movie became common after 2003 when The Matrix Reloaded used a dozen effects houses.

Tippett Studio: Linux on Macintosh Desktops

The idea of switching Mac desktops to Linux is new in the film industry. The film industry routinely uses Macs running OS X for specialized tasks, such as art department concept artwork generated using Adobe Photoshop, picture editing with Final Cut Pro and sound editing with ProTools. When you scale past a few systems, the advantages of Linux for graphics become apparent, and Linux graphics PC desktops are the norm. The television series South Park is a notable exception, with Mac OS X desktops running Maya with a Linux renderfarm.

During the production of Spiderwick, Tippett Studio switched to Fedora Linux running on Macintosh desktops. “We currently have 119 Intel-based Apple Mac Pro workstations running Linux”, says Tippett Computer Graphics Supervisor Russell Darling. “We decided to go with Apple hardware running Linux for our primary artist workstations on The Spiderwick Chronicles, although it might have been considered a risky endeavor for a show in production. We initially had some problems with sound on Maya and a few other minor issues, but they were resolved. We got a patch from Autodesk that took care of everything.” Commercial Linux software vendors work closely with film studio clients.

Tippett chose Linux on Mac for many reasons. “There’s the ability to run multiple operating systems, including Linux, OS X and Windows”, says Darling, and he continues, “The systems are fast! That makes for more productive artists. The hardware is quiet and energy-efficient. It’s cost-effective, with a good cost per rendermark [a renderfarm performance benchmark]. It’s standardized hardware. And, there’s a good support plan. Although the majority of our workstations run Linux, we have a handful of other systems running to support specific software. We use the ability to boot in to other operating systems, but the ultimate goal is to move to a simultaneous multi-OS solution, such as Parallels.”

To beat traditional alternatives, the Apple Mac Pro workstations had to meet a specific set of Tippett requirements. They had to run Fedora FC4 and XFS. They also had to run tools that Tippett uses, such as Maya with sound and in-house and third-party plugins (MEL scripts), Apple Shake with in-house and third-party plugins, SyFlex, cMuscle, RealFlow, JET, Flipper, rtTools and cineSpace. Internally developed software uses Python, Perl and C/C++. The platform must render frames identical to existing hardware. And, it has to support necessary peripherals, especially tablets.

ILM: Mulgarath, Thimbletack, the Griffin, the Sprites and Stray Sod

“The important thing with a fantasy genre is referencing nature”, says ILM Art Director Christian Alzmann. “The Byron plumage is based on a red-tailed hawk. We’re always drawing reference from nature. I did the early design of the Sprites with a bee next to them for scale, with two bees flying in formation. Mulgarath is part man, part bull, part goat, part trees. The warthog is a mean aggressive character, so we got pointy with him. And, he’s a lot more distorted. We also use scale cues, such as a Chiquita banana sticker or Pepsi bottle cap.”

“The Griffin has hair plus feathers and was rendered at 8k [images 8k pixels wide] to get detail”, says ILM Animation Supervisor Tim Harrington. To achieve that level of detail meant 25- to 30-hour renders.

“Spiderwick took 215 artists and 15 months”, says ILM Visual Effects Supervisor Tim Alexander. “It has 341 shots, 30 minutes, with 224 3-D shots.”

Industrial Light & Magic occupies the 865,000 square-foot Letterman Digital Arts Center on the 23-acre San Francisco Presidio campus. Its data network has more than 300 10GB ports and 1,500 1GB ports, with fibre to every artist’s desktop. There are 600 miles of cable throughout the four buildings on the campus. A 13,500 square-foot data center houses a Linux renderfarm with 3,000 AMD processors and more than 100TB of storage. Proprietary render management tools add Linux desktop workstations to the renderfarm pool after hours, expanding the processing capacity to more than 5,000 processors.

Tippett Studio: Hogsqueal, the Troll, Red Cap and His Army of Goblins and Bull Goblins

As Creature Supervisor for The Spiderwick Chronicles, visual effects pioneer Phil Tippett oversaw the design and development of the film’s fantasy characters. “Phil Tippett was on set with me every day”, says Director Mark Waters. “We were working on Charlotte’s Web when Mark Canton gave us the script”, says Tippett Studio Visual Effects Supervisor Joel Friesch. “When we saw the creatures, we had to do it. It’s based on real creatures, not fantasy. We wanted Hogsqueal. We created a bull goblin marquette [a detailed statuette] that gave Mark something he could hold. The bull goblin is based on toads. We brought in real toads and photographed them. We created movies good for the animators, showing how the eyes move and the throat. We created a test scene with a goblin scratching the back of his leg. That took one month of modeling and one month of animation.”

Figure 1. Tippett Studio’s proprietary Creature Manager is used to maintain a library of creatures and animation cycles. The tool allows an artist to select and preview animation by pressing the larger creature button, then selecting a combination of an appropriate physical appearance for that creature from a predefined library and placing any number of selected creatures into a Maya scene.

Hand animation is a challenging laborious process. “One guy does blocking, like moving chess pieces”, says Tippett Studio Animation Supervisor Todd Labonte. “You get it approved. We watch it over and over. You can go blind. We play it back in mirror image in our player or play it backward.” Labonte demonstrates playing back a scene of goblins invading the house, shown in their Flipper playback software, which can display a mirror image or play in reverse to help catch animation inconsistencies. Flipper is used to view both QuickTime and image frame sequences of DPX, EXR or TIFF with synchronized AIF audio. Flipper predates commercial Linux flipbooks, such as FrameCycler. At older studios, like Tippett, it’s common to find proprietary Linux tools created before commercial options were available. Tippett has a team of eight Linux programmers to maintain and develop tools.

Figure 2. Flipper is Tippett Studio’s proprietary flipbook image viewing tool. It allows an artist to view a series of individual image files as a continuous sequence. It also can be synchronized with audio, which is important for character animation. The artist can view the audio waveform to help with lip synchronization, as seen in the lower part of the screenshot. The tool also has a number of image and pixel comparison and analysis features, as seen in the dialog on the upper left. Post-camera moves can be previewed with Flipper before they are actually applied in the composite stage.

“Creature Picklist is a GUI-based Maya plugin for creatures that allows animators to see visual representations of character, which they can select for their scene”, says Darling. “In the case of Spiderwick, ‘Goblin kits’ were created as combinations of variants and blendshapes. We have shots that have more than 100 goblins. That’s too many to animate using traditional methods. The numbers are also too small to make a commercial crowd system, such as Massive, a viable solution. We developed our own system called Swarm. For the Spiderwick shots, we instanced around 150 goblins and managed animation clip data to animate them as particles.”

Figure 3. Tippett Studio’s Picklist allows an animator to select creature variants from a library of different combinations of paint schemes and body parts.

“Up until now, Adobe hasn’t done much in terms of porting its applications to Linux, as its only product to have recieved any kind of Linux implementation is Flash. This may be about to change because the company has announced a Linux port of AIR, its web application development software. No definite release date is mentioned in the interview with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, just a vague ‘later this year.’”