Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Virgin America Uses Linux to Entertain Inflight

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sat Mar 29, 2008 05:42 AM
from the slow-steady-creep dept.
anomalous cohort writes "CrunchGear has an interesting interview with the Director of Inflight Entertainment for the airline Virgin America, who discusses their adoption of Linux for the passenger's seat back computers. 'The ability to compose a music-video playlist is pretty cool and on the horizon. The READ section is also awesome in that it takes what is typically a bunch of wasted trees (excess newspapers, periodicals) and allows us to be more environmentally friendly and timely with things like news/event info/sports/entertainment etc.'"
+ -
story

Related Stories

[+] Technology: Airlines to Offer In-Flight Internet Service 181 comments
Ponca City, We Love You writes "JetBlue Airways will soon begin testing a free e-mail and instant messaging service on one aircraft, while American Airlines, Virgin America and Alaska Airlines plan to offer a broader Web experience in the coming months, probably priced at about $10 a flight. A recent survey found that 26 percent of leisure travelers would pay $10 for Internet access on a two-to-four-hour flight and 45 percent would pay that amount for a flight longer than four hours. The airlines plans to turn their planes into the equivalent of a wireless hot spot once the aircraft reaches its cruising altitude but service will not be available on takeoff and landing. While the technology could allow travelers to make phone calls over the Internet, most carriers say they have no plans to allow voice communications."
[+] Technology: Airlines Plan To Filter, Censor In-Flight Internet Access 262 comments
BlueMerle notes that the much-vaunted arrival of internet access in the friendly skies may come at the cost of heavy content filtering by the Airlines. Ars Technica's commentary is prompted by an Associated Press article which does its best to make checking your email seem sinister. "Seat 17D is yapping endlessly on an Internet phone call. Seat 16F is flaming Seat 16D with expletive-laden chats. Seat 16E is too busy surfing porn sites to care. Seat 17C just wants to sleep. Welcome to the promise of the Internet at 33,000 feet -- and the questions of etiquette, openness and free speech that airlines and service providers will have to grapple with as they bring Internet access to the skies in the coming months."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.
  • Ob (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 29 2008, @05:48AM (#22903544)
    Wheareas Arab airlines use 72 virgins...
  • Old news (Score:5, Informative)

    by antifoidulus (807088) on Saturday March 29 2008, @05:50AM (#22903552) Homepage Journal
    Delta and Continental have been using linux based systems for years. I know this because they ended up rebooting a lot and you get to see a nice penguin when it does.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      No. It was Windows. You see, Microsoft colluded with the developers of that software to crash and show the penguin. This was done to "show" all the business travelers that Linux is horribly unstable. See, you fell for it yourself. It was just FUD put there by Microsoft. Really.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      Also Swiss Air, and Qatar Airlines from my recent experience. The Linux based in flight entertainment system is becoming a familiar sight and something I look forward to when flying longer haul sections of flight.
    • Re:Old news (Score:5, Funny)

      by alpharouge (1068214) on Saturday March 29 2008, @07:20AM (#22903798)
      On a finnair flight from Helsinki to Tokyo last summer they appeared to be running linux on the personal touch-screen devices too. It worked great and it was good fun watching a few flicks on it.
      However, about an hour or two before the end of the flight they started rebooting over and over again - they were running some red hat variant on 266MHz devices if memory serves me right. The screens up at the end of the walkways rebooted at that time too, but seemed to be running windows, cant remember what variant though.

      After ten minutes of rebooting I was secretly hoping the stewardesses would make an announcement to ask if there was a systems engineer on the plane... :)
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        If they all started rebooting, I'd say that it was a power issue... Not sure what generates the electricity on the plane, but I'd say it wasn't distributing the power correctly.
  • Oh dear. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Funkcikle (630170) on Saturday March 29 2008, @05:54AM (#22903558)
    Why do articles like this always remind of those people who used to write into Amiga Format saying they saw an Amiga in some movie or television show?

    "It even had the A570 expansion next to it, but the machine itself was the A1200 which is incompatible! It was AWESOME!"
    • Amiga shamiga

      In my day we handy Tandy Color Computers with cartridges and all of our games came from Disney on cassette. It cost $800 for a 10mb hard drive and you worshiped the damn thing. If a download was over 100kb you begged your parents to stay off the phone.

      Point is, who cares what the plane has? As a business traveler I have everything I need in my handy laptop bag.

      Movies or TV - Check
      Games - Check
      Music - Check
      In-Flight Bathroom Entertainment - Check

      But I do have a secret obsession with watching
      • Re:Oh dear. (Score:5, Funny)

        by jamesh (87723) on Saturday March 29 2008, @08:50AM (#22904090)
        Doom? They should at least be running a flight simulator of some sort. That way they never have to ask "by the way, does anyone here know how to fly a plane?". They can just check the flight sim stats and tap the person with the best score on the shoulder...
  • I don't know this for certain, but I do know that from time to time I saw a cursor consisting of an arrow with the familiar hourglass next to it.

    I fear to think that they might be running a whole OS instance for each seat.

    • I just flew Air Canada for the first time last week and you're right, the seatback entertainment systems are running Windows. And poorly. There are terrible delays when responding to touches (when it responds at all) and interface elements like buttons are slow to draw on the screen. On both flights (round trip), the staff warned us beforehand that we should "be patient" with the system as it's slow to respond, and "too many touches may cause it to crash," which requires a reset (of just the crashed cons
  • The first things that came to mind when I read "Virgin America Uses Linux to Entertain Inflight" were:

    "So they are holding an install party?"

    and

    "Hackers on a plane!"

    Time to wake up and get some coffee. :S
  • by spidr_mnky (1236668) on Saturday March 29 2008, @06:24AM (#22903630)

    Virgin America Uses Linux...
    Just for a moment, I thought this referred to a demographic.
  • A guy I work with showed me a picture he took of a seat back system which had crashed with a kernel panic. That one definitely wasn't Linux. I thought it might have been something like SCO.
  • I can assure you. Otherwise, I enjoyed that entertainment system a lot, and for that matter, flying on Virgin America. Recommended.
  • My TV set runs Linux (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Daniel Phillips (238627) on Saturday March 29 2008, @06:39AM (#22903686)
    The LG TV [pcworld.com] I picked up last week runs Linux, which I noticed because the last page of the manual credits various GPL and open source software used in the TV, including Linux and Busybox and other projects. Props to LG for going beyond the call of duty in crediting their suppliers.
  • by Harold Halloway (1047486) on Saturday March 29 2008, @07:28AM (#22903820)
    I flew with Virgin from London to Tokyo about five or six years ago and Linux, specifically Slackware, was being used then for the personal entertainment systems. I found a way of causing my client to restart and passed a happy five minutes watching the boot messages.
  • by hubertf (124995) on Saturday March 29 2008, @10:51AM (#22904786) Homepage Journal
    FYI, Panasonic Aviations uses g4u, a NetBSD-based harddisk image cloning software to deploy their in-flight systems.

    For more information on g4u, see http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ [feyrer.de]

      - Hubert
          Author or g4u
    • Re:that figures (Score:4, Interesting)

      by IchBinEinPenguin (589252) on Saturday March 29 2008, @06:18AM (#22903608)
      Virgin the ultimate middlemen
      they own nothing (no assets) except a brand name

      so using free Linux is an obvious choice, but where is the source code ? have they contributed ? i think not


      Arguably they contributed the only thing they own, a brand-name.
      Associating Linux with a successful brand is a Good Thing for Linux

      their entire business is based on re-selling other peoples stuff (music/mobile/broadband/planes),
      why deal with them when you can buy direct ?

      skip the middleman


      I tried that once, but no-one wanted to lease me 1/300'th of a Jumbo...
      • by Nullav (1053766) <(moc) (at) (liamg.valluN)> on Saturday March 29 2008, @06:29AM (#22903654)

        Associating Linux with a successful brand is a Good Thing for Linux
        But we already have people associating Linux with virgins. Hardly a contribution.
        • by IchBinEinPenguin (589252) on Saturday March 29 2008, @06:41AM (#22903696)
          But we already have people associating Linux with virgins. Hardly a contribution.br
          http://www.bbspot.com/News/2000/9/linux_laid.html [bbspot.com]

          Read it and weep bitter, bitter tears of envy!
          • Charisma (Score:3, Interesting)

            I laughed when I read that page, but the reason it's funny is because it resonates as having a certain truth to it. If Microsoft really wants to bring an end to Linux, they could have no bigger impact than by spreading the meme that developing (or even using Linux) is like wearing a pocket protector and tape on the bridge of your glasses. They'd be able to do it too if Apple wasn't already in the business of doing the same thing to them with those television spots featuring John Hodgman as the PC. If you w
    • Fail! (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You missed such an easy one-liner:

      "Linux America Uses Virgins to Entertain Inflight"
    • by zenyu (248067) on Saturday March 29 2008, @11:19AM (#22904966)
      I have to agree. I flew VA a couple months back and the killer features, like web browsing were just not online yet.. The in satellite reception was also not so great, JetBlue does a better job there.

      I did enjoy the classic games running in MAME. But that also lacked polish, they didn't do a good job mapping the keys for the various games, and you couldn't hit meta keys so you couldn't reconfigure the key bindings yourself.

      They also used black 000000h as their XVideo chromakey, which meant that when the video kept going when you were in some other app the video would leak into that app. If they had used 010101h instead this issue wouldn't exist and you would still get a black screen rather than a nasty blue or green one when video was starting up.

      Overall, it was a good flight. The flight attendants were amazingly attentive. Who ever did the hiring should get a gold star.