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.'"

Old news

[antifoidulus]

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.

Amazing entrepreneur

[concernedadmin]

Richard Branson [wikipedia.org] is an unconventional man with tremendous wisdom. This seems to fit right at home with his way of doing things.

Re:Old news

[Jafar00]

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.

Yeah it's kind of sad

[amake]

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 console, thank god) that takes up to 15 minutes.

I also got booted out of a movie in the middle of it. It just kicked me back to the menu screen, and all attempts to begin playback again were met with "This selection is currently unavailable" errors. I saw a lot of people around me, but not everyone, with similar problems. It started working again a couple hours later.

In summary, it was way better than Northwest Airlines's horrible seatback system that isn't on-demand at all (shows are played on a loop on various "channels"; if you miss the beginning of something you have to wait for it to start over again). But it still needs a lot of work.

Re:Yeah it's kind of sad

[MentalMooMan]

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.

A380 uses Linux also

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple of days ago I had a flight on the Singapore Airlines A380, and their seat back entertainments system uses Linux too, with openoffice suite to let you work on documents. Whilst all of the file dialogs limit file access to just your USB drive, there are other ways to accesses the real filesystem of the unit. Looks like they make plenty of use of multicasts for video and audio, plus rtp for on demand personal video. Here is some interesting tidbits I discovered, amongst other:

bits from syslog messages:

Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: Detected 800.223 MHz processor.
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: Using tsc for high-res timesource
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: Console: colour VGA+ 80x25
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: Dentry cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 262144 bytes)
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: Inode-cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: Memory: 482924k/503744k available (2839k kernel code, 20248k reserved, 752k data, 164k init, 0k highmem)
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: Checking if this processor honours the WP bit even in supervisor mode... Ok.
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: Calibrating delay using timer specific routine.. 1602.20 BogoMIPS (lpj=801102)
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: Mount-cache hash table entries: 512
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: CPU: After generic identify, caps: 0381b93f 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K (32 bytes/line), D cache 64K (32 bytes/line)
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: CPU: L2 Cache: 64K (32 bytes/line)
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: CPU: After all inits, caps: 0381b93f 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 000000dd 00000000
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: mtrr: v2.0 (20020519)
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: CPU: Centaur VIA Nehemiah stepping 08

Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: hda: STI Flash 7.2.0, CFA DISK drive
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: Probing IDE interface ide1...
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: hdc: TOSHIBA MK4006GAH, ATA DISK drive

Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: input: Panasonic Avionics Corp PAC USB Keyboard/Credit Card Reader Ver. 1.01 as /class/input/input0
Jan 1 00:01:46 (none) kernel: input: USB HID v1.01 Keyboard [Panasonic Avionics Corp PAC USB Keyboard/Credit Card Reader Ver. 1.01] on usb-0000:00:10.0-1

Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: asyncint.c@605: announce power-on override-0 alert-0x0
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@2234: Cabin_Zone=3, PA_Zone=2
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@2272: register TDII Callback
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@622: decompression off
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@850: cabin smoke detected-off
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@870: wow-on
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@890: engine stopped-on
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@900: all doors closed-off
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@968: PA_State_Callback_ii: received 0x00
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@1025: PA: state=off volume=0, video: IP=0.0.0.0 port=0 audio: IP=0.0.0.0 port=0
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@1085: PA_Audio_Address_Callback_ii: IP:239.192.1.2 port=60739
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@1136: PA_Video_Address_Callback_ii: IP:239.192.3.2 port=52242
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@1313: zone-2 entertainment-0
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@1394: zone-2 infomode-0
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@1197: OH_Remap_MID_Callback_ii: MID=50004
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@1211: OH_Remap_PGM_Callback_ii: PGM=2
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@1245: OH_Remap_Multicast_Address_Callback_ii: IP=239.192.0.20 port=50010
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@1412: received time to destination
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@1556: received destination id
Mar 28 21:08:11 (none) icore: tdlib.c@1565: received departure id
Mar 28

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Re:Old news

[HonIsCool]

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 operating system) but rather the software that runs the entertainment system.

There was also a Linux-based karaoke machine in Tokyo that just wouldn't work for us... ^_^