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Virgin America Uses Linux to Entertain Inflight
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Saturday March 29, @05:42AM
from the slow-steady-creep dept.
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.'"
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Ob (Score:5, Funny)
Old news (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft Gorilla Propganda. (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Old news (Score:4, Funny)
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)
Re:Old news (Score:4, Funny)
Oh dear. (Score:5, Funny)
"It even had the A570 expansion next to it, but the machine itself was the A1200 which is incompatible! It was AWESOME!"
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
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
Re:Oh dear. (Score:5, Funny)
Air Canada uses Windoze (Score:2)
I fear to think that they might be running a whole OS instance for each seat.
Yeah it's kind of sad (Score:3, Informative)
Oh my! (Score:2)
"So they are holding an install party?"
and
"Hackers on a plane!"
Time to wake up and get some coffee.
Virgin America... (Score:5, Funny)
Unix-like OS's are common in that application (Score:3, Interesting)
Doom sucks on a dpad (Score:2)
My TV set runs Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
Virgin UK using it for years (Score:3, Interesting)
NetBSD @ Panasonic Aviations (Score:3, Interesting)
For more information on g4u, see http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ [feyrer.de]
- Hubert
Author or g4u
Re:that figures (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Re:that figures (Score:5, Funny)
Re:that figures (Score:5, Funny)
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)
Fail! (Score:3, Funny)
"Linux America Uses Virgins to Entertain Inflight"
Re:Several features not available (Score:4, Interesting)
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.