Fake A Hollywood Hacker Screen in Linux Terminal

I am in!

You might have heard this dialogue in almost every Hollywood movie that shows a hacking scene. There will be a dark terminal with ASCII text, diagrams and hex code changing continuously and a hacker hitting the keyboards as if he/she is typing an angry forum response.

But that’s Hollywood! Hackers break into a network system in minutes, whereas it takes months of research to do that in real world. But I’ll put the Hollywood hacking criticism aside for the moment.

Because we are going to do the same, we are going to pretend like a hacker in Hollywood style.

There’s this tiny tool that runs a script turning your Linux terminal into a Hollywood style real-time hacking terminal:

Like what you see? It even plays Mission Impossible theme music in the background. Moreover, you get a new, randomly generated hacking terminal each time you run this tool.

Let’s see how to become a Hollywood hacker in 30 seconds.

Install Hollywood hacking terminal in Linux

The tool is quite aptly called Hollywood. Basically, it runs in Byobu, a text based Window Manager and it creates a random number of random sized split windows and runs a noisy text app in each of them.

Byobu is an exciting tool developed by Dustin Kirkland of Ubuntu. Let’s focus on installing this tool.

Ubuntu users can install Hollywood using this simple command:

sudo apt install hollywood

If the above command doesn’t work in your Ubuntu or other Ubuntu-based Linux distributions such as Linux Mint, elementary OS, Zorin OS, Linux Lite etc, you may use the below PPA:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:hollywood/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install byobu hollywood

You can also get the source code of Hollywood from its GitHub repository:

Hollywood on GitHub

Once installed, you can run it using the command below, no sudo required:

hollywood

📋

As it runs Byobu first, you’ll have to use Ctrl+C twice and then use exit command to stop the hacking terminal script.

Here’s a video of the fake Hollywood hacking. Do subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Linux fun videos.

It’s a fun little tool that you can use to amaze your friends, family, and colleagues. Maybe you can even impress girls in the bar though I don’t think it is going to help you a lot in that field.