一些阿凡达制作的背景资料：(信息来源：http://www.reallylinux.com/docs/avataruseslinux.shtml)

* 阿凡达由一家位于新西兰惠灵顿的名为 WETA Digital 的公司渲染制作，这家公司同时制作过 Lord of the Rings, Fantastic Four, King Kong, and Avatar 等电影的动画特效；
* 渲染服务器采用的是 RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) Cluster，具体节点数未知，大概在数百台以上；
* 服务器硬件采用的是 HP 的刀片服务器；
* 使用的是 64 位基于 Linux 的 3D 建模和渲染软件。

相关：

Linux in Hollywood：http://digitalcontentproducer.com/dcc/revfeat/video_linux_hollywood/

According to the blog of EOS Direcctory, there are some clear trends and patterns that can be highlighted:

Govenmental push and push back
In the year 2009, US government pushing Open Source in health care and on the contrary the Swiss government don’t give Open Source a choice, they choose Microsoft product exclusively.

Rise of new Open Source services players
Despite the financial crisis and the economic recession, many new Open Source services companies emerge all around the world and most of them are happy with their healthy pipelines.

Continued consolidation within Open Source
Many smaller and fresh companies with niche technologies been acquired and consolidated with other big players, e.g. Terracotta has acquired EHcache, SpringSource taken over multiple companies.

Commercial vendors continued to acquire Open Source companies
VMware bought SpringSource, Oracle taking over Sun.

Linux has continued to increase its presence
Linux wins the consumers hearts throught mobile phones and netbooks and continued its leading on the server side.

You can read the complete story here.

内容如下：

aterm, xterm, Eterm, rxvt, Konsole, oh my!

“Konsole” supports transparency, but it is slow (and most importantly for me, does not have the “fixed” fonts that xterm uses). “xterm” is cool, but I want transparency which it doesn’t have. “Eterm” is, again, slower than “xterm”, and though it does support backgrounds, you cannot, as far as I have explored it, make “Eterm” use any image for background. On the flip side, “Eterm” has support for the fixed fonts like xterm. But I desperately need “transparency”.

Look at “aterm”. Although working on the shoulders of “rxvt”, “aterm” is pretty much like “xterm”, supports all the things “xterm” does, and provides fast visually pleasing effects (without hogging up resources like Konsole), including, what I want the most, transparency. Not only that, you can configure “aterm” to use fixed font. What more do I want?

我的选择是 aterm，然后 xterm，其他就不考虑了。