Trip the Light Fantastic - Linux in the Special Effects Industry
In early 1998, Linux users began to be aware that their operating system of choice was making a serious impact in the field of movie production. Daryll Strauss had written an article for the Linux Journal, in which he described how Digital Domain had rendered scenes for the box-office busting Titanic on a farm of Linux boxes. Eight years later, the foothold of Linux in the industry is well established, and so we paid a visit to this pioneering studio to talk to Doug Roble, Creative Director of Software, and Dave Fallon, manager of the Systems Administration department at Hollywood effects studio Digital Domain, to find out how it happened.
Daniel James: Doug - what year did you join Digital Domain?
Doug: I joined the company in 1993. Because of turnover there are only two people in the whole company who have been here longer than I have - the President, and one of the Vice Presidents. True Lies was our first very large film. Before Titanic we had also done Apollo 13 and Interview with a Vampire. James Cameron had gone to a Polish shipyard and asked them how much it would cost to retro-fit an old tanker so that it looked like the Titanic, at least on the outside, so that he could sail it around the ocean. It would have cost a lot of money, but it wouldn't have given him the kind of control that he had.
DJ: So it was costed as a realistic option then?
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Jon "maddog" Hall tells a story of the early days of Linux, when Red Hat was young, and Bob Young was the man in the know. Bob Young had gone to the Unix Expo in New York City with the three founders of Red Hat, Marc Ewing, Donnie Barnes, and Eric Trohn:
"They had driven up in a panel truck from North Carolina to the Unix Expo, and had set up their booth, which consisted of a couple of boxes, boards across the top, a white checquered tablecloth and some book racks which held CDs and copies of their boxes. It was the end of the first day, and I went across to the guys, and said,
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