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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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...:)
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.
Finnair also uses Linux entertainment systems, and they are also really flakey. Not all of them start to reboot at once, but every once in a while the screen goes black for some passanger and they have to ask the flight attendent to reboot the system... Well, I've only been on two Finnair flights as of late (fall of 2007) but I think there at least 5-7 crashes during the 9+ hour flights, in my compartment... On the other hand, obviously the problem is not with Linux itself (count that as kernel or the base op
To add to the list - Cathay Pacific also uses Linux, Ubuntu if I remember correctly, for their entertainment system, and I also learned this when the system was having trouble and the nice stewardess rebooted it for me. Good to see the Tux is everywhere.
Same on VirginAmerica. When I flew on VA earlier this year, their systems were extremely unstable. I probably saw half a dozen of them kernel panic, and reboot.
They also had a bunch of open source games available, like Xmahjongg.
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
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 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
Actually, I had a trans-atlantic flight with NWA in February, and the seat-back systems in their Airbus A330 were running linux, and were on-demand. They had to reboot the system once or twice, and I got kicked out of my film once (into what seemed to be like a looping analogue video channel - maybe they were running both systems at once?), but other than that, the system worked rather well.
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 found the "Red" system quite entertaining. Very slick. Trying to get root access with key combinations kept me busy whenever I wasn't playing Mahjong.
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.
Heh. My aging sony tv (2 year old LCD) is running Linux, and their user interface is running on X. It is very funny to see it crap out after blinking several times when I connect a notebook to the vga port and start testing out video modes, although frankly I'm not quite sure why would it crap out that way. I am too lazy to look it up and link, but you can download the whole set of software running on the TV from their website.
More nn topic (in glorious AOL me-too style), I've seen the Linux logo (on reboot)
...and by the way, note that the pcworld reviewer who wrote that negative review got 483 thumbs down for his efforts. On Amazon the set is highly rated [amazon.com], and I am more than pleased with it. Ideal match for a PS3.
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.
I disagree. Remember that there are file servers and seat back computers, they could be running different distros. They could have slightly different setups in different planes. Second of all, Fedora and RHEL/RHED are quite different. Fedora is more bleeding edge, RH is more carefully tested and is fully supported. Your analogy of a parent brand vs its product is a little off. Fedora is its own brand even if it is developed by and sharing tech with Redhat, think a mix of "Ford and Mercury". Even if VA
I flew Virgin America last week from DC to California and back and overall the experience was good (good ticket price, too!). The in-flight entertainment left a few things to be desired, though. Aside from crashing two or three times during flight, many features (including the "READ" feature mentioned above) were simply "not available." A friend on another flight said she was on a plane that couldn't receive a single channel the entire flight. The song playlists were not very responsive, either, with long h
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.
I on a Qatar Airlines flight to Doha last month. Linux was in use there for their in-flight services (again, the penguin at the boot screen gave it away). Immediately after I had a flight from Doha to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysian Airlines). Malaysian Airlines seems to use it as well as they seemed to be using the same system (at least with the plane I was in).
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.
Riiiight. Trees are biodegradable, renewable, grown for paper and lumber stock and have a positive impact on the environment. But hey, an electric gizmo on a jumbo-jet is better! The idea that we're "saving a tree" by recycling paper is harmless, but stupid.
I just saw this for the first time on a delta flight. I was really excited to see tux in the upper left while all the kernel messages ran down the little screen and seeing this happen on everyone else's screen. Every screen was not showing the exact same thing at the same time, so I'm thinking every seat has its own virtual machine. It seemed to be running an older version of redhat, but I don't remember what specifically I saw. I thought it would be really cool to just play chess to pass the time until I tr
I've tried out the Virgin America system. Half of the VA flights I went on lacked the hardware, but on the newer planes that have it, most of the features don't yet work. There are billboards around SF touting its in cabin IM features (chat with other passengers), but they weren't working yet.
I tried ordering snacks, but that didn't work either.
Movies cost something ridiculous like $8 to watch.
Most of the system is just a placeholder. And please, a seatback display is maybe okay for watching TV video clips,
You are arguing that you'd rather watch something on a seat back screen? Have you ever been on an airplane? The "tiny" display on my iPhone can be held closer to your face. You can also double tap and pinch to make the tiniest text readable.
I can use my iPhone for as many hours as I like by plugging it into a standard USB battery pack via the dock connector. I can also plug it into my laptop and recharge it. I find that I prefer to watch movies on my tiny iPhone rather than pulling out my laptop and watching
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
The Virgin Earth Challenge prize will be open to entries for five years, with ideas assessed by a panel of judges that includes Branson, former vice president Al Gore, U.S. climate scientist James Hansen, British environmental writer and former diplomat Crispin Tickell, British scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock, and Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery. The winning solu
If you want to be more environmentally friendly, stop working in an airline company and stop bugging us with this "Hey look! We spew our yearly CO2 quota flying forth and back between LA & NY but it's cool because we replaced newspapers with Linux machines" crap.
Thank you.
...and only use your computer for important things like posting self-rightous BS like "Hey look! I made a comment that on the surface sounds insightful, but actually contains no substance, but it's cool because I am 43 years old a
FWIW - I liked the USB port because I was able to recharge my iPod while listening. Very sweet feature for those very, very flight schedules. It's not uncommon that I'll need 28 hours to get from my door to my final destination. Kudos to Singapore Air for that USB port.
FWIW - I liked the USB port because I was able to recharge my iPod while listening.
Jetstar (Qantas low-cost subsidery) also uses linux-based personal video devices, the digEplayer XT [digecor.com]. They aren't built into the seats, but rather passed out (to those who shell out an extra $10 for it) at the beginning of the flight. I also found the USB port quite handy, as the devices are basically big batteries with screens the front. They've also got ethernet ports, but I didn't find a way to hack those...
Ob (Score:5, Funny)
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Is that a fig in your pants, or are you just dead?
Old news (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft Gorilla Propganda. (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Old news (Score:5, 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...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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Well, I've only been on two Finnair flights as of late (fall of 2007) but I think there at least 5-7 crashes during the 9+ hour flights, in my compartment...
On the other hand, obviously the problem is not with Linux itself (count that as kernel or the base op
Re:Old news - Cathay too (Score:2)
Malaysia and Singapore as well. (Score:2)
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They also had a bunch of open source games available, like Xmahjongg.
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Re:Old news (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, 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!"
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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)
Parent
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)
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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)
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Doom sucks on a dpad (Score:2)
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My TV set runs Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
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Think of the possibilities.
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I am too lazy to look it up and link, but you can download the whole set of software running on the TV from their website.
More nn topic (in glorious AOL me-too style), I've seen the Linux logo (on reboot)
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Virgin UK using it for years (Score:3, Interesting)
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Several features not available (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Parent
at use in other airlines as well (Score:2, Interesting)
Immediately after I had a flight from Doha to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysian Airlines). Malaysian Airlines seems to use it as well as they seemed to be using the same system (at least with the plane I was in).
NetBSD @ Panasonic Aviations (Score:4, Interesting)
For more information on g4u, see http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ [feyrer.de]
- Hubert
Author or g4u
Thanks Virgin! (Score:2)
Riiiight. Trees are biodegradable, renewable, grown for paper and lumber stock and have a positive impact on the environment. But hey, an electric gizmo on a jumbo-jet is better! The idea that we're "saving a tree" by recycling paper is harmless, but stupid.
I saw this on Delta too (Score:2)
I thought it would be really cool to just play chess to pass the time until I tr
Doesn't work yet (Score:2)
There are billboards around SF touting its in cabin IM features (chat with other passengers), but they weren't working yet.
I tried ordering snacks, but that didn't work either.
Movies cost something ridiculous like $8 to watch.
Most of the system is just a placeholder. And please, a seatback display is maybe okay for watching TV video clips,
Re: (Score:2)
The "tiny" display on my iPhone can be held closer to your face. You can also double tap and pinch to make the tiniest text readable.
I can use my iPhone for as many hours as I like by plugging it into a standard USB battery pack via the dock connector. I can also plug it into my laptop and recharge it. I find that I prefer to watch movies on my tiny iPhone rather than pulling out my laptop and watching
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...
Parent
Re:that figures (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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!
Parent
Charisma (Score:3, Interesting)
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I was _really_ expecting you to add
flood the next LCA with bimbos and himbos to distract developers.
Fail! (Score:3, Funny)
"Linux America Uses Virgins to Entertain Inflight"
His $25M prize for solutions to global warming (Score:2)
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FWIW - I liked the USB port because I was able to recharge my iPod while listening.
Jetstar (Qantas low-cost subsidery) also uses linux-based personal video devices, the digEplayer XT [digecor.com]. They aren't built into the seats, but rather passed out (to those who shell out an extra $10 for it) at the beginning of the flight. I also found the USB port quite handy, as the devices are basically big batteries with screens the front. They've also got ethernet ports, but I didn't find a way to hack those...