Airbus 380 To Have Linux In Every Seat 332
jpatokal writes "Singapore Airlines will be rolling out the A380 superjumbo on October 26th, and a surprise awaits in the seat of every passenger: their personal Linux PC, running Red Hat. In addition to running the in-flight entertainment, passengers can also use a full copy of StarOffice, and there's a USB slot for importing/exporting documents or plugging in your own keyboard/mouse. Screen size is 10.6" (1280x768) in economy, 15.4" in business and a whopping 23" in first class (along with free noise-canceling headphones). The system is already available on current B777-300ER planes and will also be outfitted on the upcoming B787 Dreamliners."
Delta/Song already uses Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
the kernel was a 2.4 version as I recall...
Re:Delta/Song already uses Linux (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Delta/Song already uses Linux (Score:4, Funny)
And here's a picture of the reboot.. (Score:5, Informative)
Had to talk them into a reboot! (Score:3, Informative)
I love this comment [flickr.com]:
Despite the hostile shake rattle and roll environment, you know they mostly reboot when they want to not at random. Notice how it was not a big deal for them to oblige the picture taker? They knew all of them would come back up.
Re:Delta/Song already uses Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Delta indeed uses red-hat linux on their 'seat in front of you consoles'
Also loading some modules which taint the kernel (according to the message I saw)
I think it had to do with AAC.
Nothing against Linux on planes, BUT please, have someone on-board to service the
system or let it be serviced from the ground. As our flight from Las Vegas to New York
only showed red hat reboots continually during the flight, all the time. seemed like
Linux did boot with some ramdisk checksum errors, but it booted, but when the X layer
came on this triggered another reboot.
I'm a unix guy all the way, and they told me I could not have access to the plane's
media 'mainframe' or I would have had a look to see what was wrong. All I saw was that
the whole right side economy side of the plane was left with a rebooting red-hat distribution
showing a cute penguin in its left corner...
The whole time... 5 hours long...
This was NOT a good commercial. I wish it had been.
The whole system worked perfectly when I was flying to San Francisco two weeks ago!
Re:Delta/Song already uses Linux (Score:5, Funny)
media 'mainframe' or I would have had a look to see what was wrong.
Wow, they sound like idiots. What airline wouldn't want a random passenger given root access to their systems?
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media 'mainframe' or I would have had a look to see what was wrong.
Igniting your shoes is so 2002.
The Year of Linux on the Desktop (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Year of Linux on the Desktop (Score:5, Funny)
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"Who's flying the plane?!"
*Runs to the cokcpit to discover a penguin in a pilot hat flying it well*
"Phew... hey, wait a second, penguins can't fly!"
*plane starts to go into a nosedive*
Re:Delta/Song already uses Linux (Score:4, Funny)
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Heh. One question that came to mind immediately was: Did those people actually see linux crash, or did they see linux rebooting. These are two very different things, of course, but I've found that even experienced users can be rather sloppy about such insignificant details.
I'm sure that most people who've taken commercial flights have noticed things like the cabin lights all flickering at times, especially during takeoff. No big deal for lights, but thi
industrial espionage (Score:2, Insightful)
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clcikety click www.google.com "How to hijack a planes" bombs "box cutters"
I always believed (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I always believed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I always believed (Score:5, Funny)
One the size of a keyboard and mouse?
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About the same size of bomb they can fit into a laptop. They'd better open up every one of those on its way in, and I mean with a screwdriver. One terrorist in a nice suit with a business class ticket and a rigged laptop = boom.
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FWIW (Score:4, Interesting)
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Dedicated turbine (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Dedicated turbine (Score:5, Informative)
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Hydraulics is powered by electric pumps, not by power of will.
Dude, give it up. You keep sticking your foot in your mouth with your technical ignorance. There are indeed electrical hydraulic pumps, but they're auxiliary systems; the primary systems are mechanical and run directly off the engine accessory drive.
All in all, completely losing power is unacceptable, but in case you lose all your primary generators the airplane gets dark fast. I do not recall for how long the batteries ought to suffice, but your figure (30 min.) is close enough to what I said. Most of the battery's power will be spent on mechanically controlling the airplane.
No, mechanically controlling the airplane when APU and engine power is lost is achieved hydraulically via the Ram Air Turbine. The RAT powers the control surfaces directly, and electrical systems via a hydraulic generator. Batteries only provide power for the
Re:Dedicated turbine (Score:4, Informative)
Engine driven AC generators. If the pumps are unpowered, the engines will gravity feed (except #2 on a DC-10... it's uphill), though they will probably not have enough fuel flow to make rated takeoff power. Not a problem in cruise.
Essential instruments (and the lights to see them) are on a separate bus powered by the back up battery via an inverter for a minimum of 30 minutes. On some aircraft, indefinitely via a RAT (ram air turbine.)
Fire detection is always on a battery powered bus.
Unless your flying a 787 (no one has yet), your hydraulics on a Boeing or Airbus are powered by engine driven hydraulic pumps. There are usually some electric auxilary pumps for various events/circumstances, but not primary flight control.
100% wrong. Controls are hydraulic. (Electric/hydraulic on the 380, but no battery in flight could power that.)
Entertainment systems and galleys are the first things offloaded in the event of a generator failure. The biggest risk thes entertainment system pose is fire - ask SwissAir [wikipedia.org]
Don't forget the RAT (Score:4, Interesting)
"A ram air turbine (RAT) is a small propeller and connected hydraulic pump, or electrical generator used as an emergency power source for aircraft. In case of the loss of both primary and auxiliary power sources the RAT will power vital systems (flight controls, linked hydraulics and also flight-critical instrumentation). Some RATs produce only hydraulic power, that is then used to power electrical generators."
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As for scarcity, power isn't a terribly scare resource on an airplane. Remember, the engines are producing tens of MWs of power at cruise speed. Taking even a couple of hundred KWs off the main shaft to power electrical systems is not really a problem.
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Re:FWIW (Score:5, Informative)
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This is not the first Airbus with Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Security? (Score:5, Informative)
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did i say it was fool proof? No.
Well you did say "it's about as secure as i can imagine" and frankly it's not even remotely secure. There is a good reason that kiosks don't normally come with keyboards and usb ports, because it allows the user to have too much access to secure effectively. With a USB drive you can bring your own tools with you like a bash shell, exploits, rootkits.
Your assuming the user has any execute permissions at all
Yeah, that will be real useful system with no execute privileges. They won't be able run any applications! You might as well give them an etch-a-sketch
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After a few minutes I'd managed to kill the kiosk software, bring up the on-screen keyboard and start browsing around their local network shares - which had "saved" customer pictures on.
My point is that for kiosk style systems it should be an absolut
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And not many places to connect USB devices, keyboards, and stuff?
Reading is fundamental (Score:3, Informative)
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Well, no wonder. (Score:3, Insightful)
Airlines are not going to put an OS synonymous with "crash" in front of passengers. Everything, right down to the lighting has to work well to keep the appearance of order. Anything else makes the passengers nervous and looking for another airline.
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Not so nice on the way back, about 1/3 of the seats had some kind of filesystem cross linking, the introduction menu was a piece of Shrek 2, any other movie would play the wrong one and then break. They tried to fix it by rebooting (making us all see that it was indeed that penguin-kernel running it), but it didn't work. This was back in 2005, but as others have already pointed out, it takes far more than just a
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On other long flights, I couldn't tell. I mean, the reality is that the custom UI is what the user experiences. Typically these things "crash" only when the power is abruptly yanked
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When I flew international in 2004, every movie was on a "channel" and everyone watching that movie would be doing so at the same time. However in early 2006, I too saw Linux in flight. Now the movies were ondemand with fast forward, pause, etc. But like most people I saw the system reboot WAY too much, one 2.5hr long movie crashed at least 4 times in between. Thank goodness for fast-forward. But I agree the GUI is really what makes the difference not necessarily the operating system.
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Of course neither of the adjectives is valid, as you probably well know.
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Deplaning (Score:2)
Re:Well, no wonder. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well, no wonder. (Score:4, Interesting)
There's too big a difference between stability over a eight hour period on a single user system that gets shut down nightly and other machines - hence the 2003 version and even 2000 version instead of XP.
Long uptimes have a suprising downside - I always forget how long it takes Solaris to boot and get nervous staring at a blank screen for a long time every time I start it - once every year (we don't need it over Christmas so it goes down for a week). An uptime of a year is no major accomplisment for any decent operating system. That is what people in the last decade or two mean by computer stability - and Microsoft software despite all it's advantages and improvements is just not playing in that game at all. They got to where they are by being cheap enough and just good enough. It gave us what is really the Microsoft PC instead of the IBM PC, which makes me grateful that I can effectively put a relatively inexpensive more powerful version of games machines into a rack to make up a processing cluster instead of something expensive from Sun or IBM.
StarOffice or Microsoft Office? (Score:5, Informative)
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Yeah, the two articles don't agree on that. But the system is based on the Panasonic eX2 [panasonic.aero] which is Linux by all accounts. And simple math (500+ seats times $299 per office license) tells you a single plane would have an IT cost roughly equivalent to that of a mid-sized company.
I think the smart money's on StarOffice here...
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finally (Score:5, Funny)
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Didn't these guys learn anything from "The Net"??? (Score:2)
Surely, someone will r00t the terminal, take over the plane's guidance systems, and from there, the entire air traffic network!!!
Re:Didn't these guys learn anything from "The Net" (Score:2)
Keyboards? Mice? (Score:2)
StarOffice ? (Score:2, Interesting)
A bootup shot. (Score:3, Informative)
Gutenberg (Score:5, Interesting)
OT, (Score:2)
You haven't fully experienced mobility until... (Score:5, Funny)
How to crash at 27,000 feet (Score:5, Funny)
Do they know something we don't? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a little worried that this is a result of Singapore Airlines management knowing something that the rest of us don't - namely, that it won't be long before laptops are banned from the passenger cabin for "security" reasons.
SQ is already the preferred airline for most business travelers who fly their routes. After this, they'll be able to lock up the rest, providing at least a usable means for productivity to business travelers who would otherwise have to sit on their hands the entire flight.
But can it run MAME... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not according to the article you link to (Score:3, Informative)
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But hey, here's a question: Let's say the airline makes a bunch of modifications to the GPL software they're using. I understand that they do not need to release those modifications unless they distribute the software. Does making Linux-machines available to their customers count as distribution?
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But hey, here's a question: Let's say the airline makes a bunch of modifications to the GPL software they're using. I understand that they do not need to release those modifications unless they distribute the software. Does making Linux-machines available to their customers count as distribution?
I shouldn't think so.
The software stays in one place - the airplane's computers. The passengers do not download the binaries, they just use the software while flying.
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No.
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Clipping its wings (Score:2)
Re:In Singapore (Score:5, Interesting)
In my opinion, the best part about this is Star Office. Eventhough in reality it probably is quite unlikely many people will use it, from the vendor's standpoint, it was nearly trivial to implement... That is the true power of OSS, which is over the longterm adding allot of functionality with limited cost.
Re:In Singapore (Score:5, Insightful)
While I would like to point out this is not about critical flight control systems (where I doubt any Linux would be certified as it costs a lot to be) and in-flight entertainment machines are OK to crash sometimes, the specific functionality is, probably, a win for Linux distros.
But, in the end, I suspect the real deal here is about price. The cheapest solution won. It would be hideously expensive to have Windows Vista PCs with Office 2007 on every seat of a jetliner.
Re:In Singapore (Score:5, Interesting)
Doubt no more...
RTLinuxPro is shipping in the just released Gen4 EFIS/One glass cockpit from Blue Mountain Avionics. [technologynewsdaily.com]
"Airspeed, Altitude and VSI, magnetically slaved all-attitude compass, HSI, solid state AHRS (Attitude Heading Reference System), a 12 channel GPS navigation engine and the highest resolution 3D terrain available. There's also a built in digital autopilot with altitude hold and ILS capture, a full air data computer with fuel burn and fuel totalizing functions, a flight planning system and digital monitoring of up to 32 engine gauges. The built in flight recorder and the new flight performance software, monitors flights, engine performance and much more."
Now obviously this is not your average linux distro, but then there are many reasons one could expect to find linux used in a flight control system, one of those reasons is the robust nature of linux and its reputation for not crashing. That's not to say that linux never crashes, but in my experience crashes involve running questionable code, i.e. closed source graphics drivers and the games that require those drivers.
Re:In Singapore (Score:4, Informative)
More specifically, RTCore provides the Hard Real Time interrupt and thread handling as RTlinux alone is only Soft Real Time capable. But make no mistake, RTlinux is not used as an in flight entertainment system in the EFIS/One.
The following paper has a good description of what RTCore is and does for RTlinux.
http://vir.liu.se/~TDDB72/rtproj/reports2006/04-v
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They could also go the thin client with beefy server route. Maybe not as good for a in flight entertainment system, but good enough for browsing and emailing.
But they will probably wait until people (read: their astroturf teams) start complaining OpenOffice is not Office and refuses to read their MSOOXML files before they announce their move that
Re:In Singapore (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In Singapore (Score:4, Interesting)
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I suppose the big thing is actually being able to be productive mid flight. Until they start offering RJ45 sockets for me to browse the net freely on my own notebook I'm not going to be excited.
Re:In Singapore (Score:5, Informative)
They already offered a computer equivalent entertainment system (in coach!), but this sounds even better.
I hate most carriers and I hate flying with all the security and no-smoking crap, but in a bad environment, Singapore Airlines and their sister Silk Air do quite a nice job and Changi Airport is *sweet* as International airports go.
The Singapore government may have issues with some, but all my experiences with Singapore have been positive. Reading this makes my day.
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Pretty sure they are logging everything during flight and you've had a thorough identification before you entered the plane.
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Cheers,
-j.
Even more data leakage.. (Score:3, Informative)
Not in a gazillion years for anything sensitive, IMHO.