Have you seen any of the films in the saga Matrix? If not? I hope I do not count any Spoilers when I say that in the famous trilogy we humans are living in a false world inside a special software. Machines control us and draw energy from us and the Matrix is for us to live "happily" while using batteries. From outside this virtual world you can see what happens in the Matrix if we look at a computer screen where green letters fall, as long as we know how to decipher what those images show.
Having explained the above and knowing what I mean, wouldn't you like to be able to simulate the Matrix effect on your computer with Ubuntu? There are many ways to do this, but one of them doesn't require installing too many packages. Here we will teach you two different options to achieve the Matrix effect that will allow us to simulate it directly from the Terminal.
Simulating the Matrix effect with matrix
First we will talk about the easiest option to urge. Is about matrix, a package that is available in the Ubuntu default repositories. To install it, we will simply open a terminal and type the following:
sudo apt-get install cmatrix
And to run it, we open a Terminal (or the one we were in) and write "cmatrix" without the quotes. It couldn't be easier.
Red Matrix effect with cmatrix
In addition to the normal effect, we have several options available. If in the terminal we write "cmatrix -help" we will see what we can modify. For example, if we add -B we will see the letters in bold, which is much better. If what we want is to exit the Matrix effect by pressing any letter (by default we exit by pressing the Q key), we have to write «cmatrix -s» where the letter S means Screensaver. If what we want is to see a Matrix effect in bold red that when touching a key it stops and at minimum speed, we have to write «cmatrix -sB -u 10 -C red».
Greenrain, a more visual option of the Matrix effect
Matrix effect with Greenrain
Another option is to use greenrain. I would say that greenrain is the option that is missing matrix, since it saturates the screen a little more and that is better. The problem is that it does not bring any option.
The process to get greenrain It is more complex, but it is worth it if you want to see a slightly more visual effect. To obtain greenrain we will do the following.
- We open a Terminal and write the following to download the necessary dependencies:
sudo apt-get install git build-essential libncurses5-dev
- Next, we will make a copy of the program's source code in our Downloads folder, for which we will write:
cd ~/Descargas/ git clone https://github.com/aguegu/greenrain
- The next step is to compile what we have downloaded, and we will do it by typing the following in the Terminal:
cd ~/Descargas/greenrain make
- Finally, we copy the binary in the corresponding folder, for which we will write:
sudo mv ~/Descargas/greenrain/greenrain /usr/local/bin/
- Optional: we can delete the source code, since we will no longer need it, by writing in the Terminal:
cd ~/Descargas/ rm -rf greenrain/
We would have it all. Now we only have to write "greenrain" (without the quotes) to execute it and the letter Q to close it. As you can see, it is more visual than matrix, which I think lacks any option to load the screen a little more. What option is your favorite?