Linux Candy

Linux Candy: Hollywood – fill your console with Hollywood melodrama technobabble

Last Updated on May 25, 2022

In Operation

Here’s a short video showing Hollywood in action.

Hollywood doesn’t provide any musical accompaniment. But in the spirit of open source goodness, the video has a track from an open source music album. There are no prizes for correctly guessing the artist and album!

What is Hollywood doing? First, it starts up a tmux session. tmux is a “terminal multiplexer”. This application enables a number of terminals (or windows) to be created, accessed and controlled from a single screen. If the program finds Byobu installed, that’s run. Byobu is a text-based window manager and terminal multiplexer. If Byobu is not installed, the script just uses plain tmux.

The script then fires up a variety of programs designed to fill up multiple terminal sessions (displayed in a single window). These programs include apg, atop, bmon, CMatrix, hexdump, htop, jp2a, man, MPlayer, speedometer, stat, and tree. It also outputs things like log files using ccze, a log colorizer.

All the processes generated by Hollywood are allocated a niceness of 19, the lowest priority.

Next page: Page 3 – Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary

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Marco Vancini
Marco Vancini
4 years ago

A typographic error surely?

“a niceness of -19, the lowest priority”

It should be +19 (plus nineteen) not -19 (minus nineteen)

From the manual page for “nice”,

“Niceness values range from -20 (most favorable to the process) to 19 (least favorable to the process).”