Virgin America Uses Linux to Entertain Inflight

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.'"

Ob

[Anonymous Coward]

Wheareas Arab airlines use 72 virgins...

Oh dear.

[Funkcikle]

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!"

Microsoft Gorilla Propganda.

[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.

Virgin America...

[spidr_mnky]

Virgin America Uses Linux...

Just for a moment, I thought this referred to a demographic.

Re:Oh dear.

[fat_mike]

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 that little airplane travel over the map...even though I'm sitting in the goddamn plane, in the window seat, but still watch the little plane go over that goddamn map.

But I forgot the point of this thread

LINUX!!!!!!!!

Re:that figures

[Nullav]

Associating Linux with a successful brand is a Good Thing for Linux

But we already have people associating Linux with virgins. Hardly a contribution.

Fail!

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed such an easy one-liner:

"Linux America Uses Virgins to Entertain Inflight"

Re:that figures

[IchBinEinPenguin]

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!

Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, American Linux users are Virgins.

Re:Old news

[alpharouge]

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:Old news

[Idiomatick]

You kidding? He lets anyone and everyone see what hes hiding under his frontend, exposing himself like that.

Re:Oh dear.

[jamesh]

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...

Re:Old news

[my $anity 0]

Only if they look. Or use Gentoo.