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.'"

Re:that figures

[IchBinEinPenguin]

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...

Unix-like OS's are common in that application

[MichaelSmith]

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.

My TV set runs Linux

[Daniel Phillips]

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.

Virgin UK using it for years

[Harold Halloway]

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.

Several features not available

[sonofabeach]

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 hesitations after touching the touchscreen.

So it seems like they've still got a few things to work out. The best feature that was not yet available was a "WWW" feature granting access to the internet.

If they can work out some of these issues, VA could have a real winner on their hands. The in-flight ordering system, though expensive for non-water and non-soda items, was the best I've ever seen.

at use in other airlines as well

[Nova]

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).

NetBSD @ Panasonic Aviations

[hubertf]

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:Several features not available

[zenyu]

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.

Charisma

[srobert]

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 want the use of Linux to spread then you have to not only make it a good reliable OS (which it already is) but you have to make it seem charismatic. Advertising agencies understand this intuitively. Of course, then we wouldn't be talking about it on Slashdot: News for Nerds.