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The Flying Penguin: Linux In-Flight Entertainment Systems (LinuxInsider)
LinuxInsider
reports
on the use of Linux for in-flight entertainment systems.
"If you've used an in-flight entertainment system, known in the airline industry as an "IFE," to watch movies, listen to music, or order food lately, chances are it used Linux Linux as an operating system.
You might not know that Linux is the operating system behind what you see on your screen, but it probably is. United, Delta, Qantas, Emirates, Virgin America, Aeromexico, Air New Zealand and many other airlines all use versions of Linux-based IFE software."
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The Flying Penguin: Linux In-Flight Entertainment Systems (LinuxInsider) Posted Dec 18, 2008 21:33 UTC (Thu) by JoeF (subscriber, #4486) [Link]
I've seen that on a United flight earlier this year. They had to reboot the system, and I was pleased to see the Linux boot messages on the screen.
The Flying Penguin: Linux In-Flight Entertainment Systems (LinuxInsider) Posted Dec 18, 2008 21:35 UTC (Thu) by jonth (subscriber, #4008) [Link]
I remember seeing a similar thing on Virgin. I wasn't all that happy to see the reboot, however.... it really wasn't good advertising!
The Flying Penguin: Linux In-Flight Entertainment Systems (LinuxInsider) Posted Dec 18, 2008 23:46 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link] The one on Virgin is independent per seat, I think all the seats booted once cabin power came on.
Pictures from 2005 Posted Dec 18, 2008 22:14 UTC (Thu) by jimwelch (guest, #178) [Link] A lot of the reboots are due to bad power and switching between ground and air power.
Pictures from 2005 Posted Dec 19, 2008 15:38 UTC (Fri) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] I saw a similar reboot on Thai airways a few month ago, it had to reboot after touchdown.
The Flying Penguin: Linux In-Flight Entertainment Systems (LinuxInsider) Posted Dec 18, 2008 23:21 UTC (Thu) by ummmwhat (guest, #54087) [Link]
I saw one of these systems on a Northwest flight about a month and a half ago. This one sure gave a bad impression.
Apparently, the system somehow organizes the seats of the airplane into groups. On my flight, one of the groups was having some sort of problem and the flight attendants decided to restart that group. They explained this in an announcement to all passengers, which included the warning that the restart would take 20 minutes and the passengers in the affected rows should be very careful not to touch any of the buttons controlling the display because that would make their screen become frozen permanently (until another restart, I assume).
It seems that didn't fix the problem, since later there was an announcement that the entire entertainment system would be restarted. This time, the attendant making the announcement said it would take 30 minutes, and gave the same warning about not touching any of the buttons controlling the display because it would freeze the screen permanently.
When I saw Tux appear on the screen during the restart, I cringed. Such negative advertising for Linux. Whoever made the design vulnerable to button presses when the system was not ready to process them properly should have his programming license permanently revoked. And restart times of 20 to 30 minutes seem unjustifiable to me. It seems like someone didn't use appropriate parallelism. Finally, boot and initialization messages should not have been displayed at each seat -- the screens should either have had some sort of simple "please wait while the system is being started" message or have been entirely blank.
Linus should consider withholding permission for using his trademark from the makers of such wretchedly implemented systems.
The Flying Penguin: Linux In-Flight Entertainment Systems (LinuxInsider) Posted Dec 19, 2008 3:08 UTC (Fri) by kirkland (guest, #53307) [Link]
I videoed the boot sequence on my last Continental flight. It's available in fairly high definition at:
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1-rfMBp6vw
Sorry for the bumps. Blame it on the pilot.
They could do with a bit more streamlining on their init processes. But then again, it is the airline industry. Waiting for little to no apparent reason is status quo...
:-Dustin
Blaming the pilot (off-topic) Posted Dec 20, 2008 4:03 UTC (Sat) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Sorry for the bumps. Blame it on the pilot. "Ladies and gentleman, on behalf of _______ Airlines, we'd like to welcome you to _______. As for the bumpy landing, well it wasn't the pilot's fault, nor was it the co-pilot's fault. It was the asphalt." Sorry, I couldn't resist. Of course, that humor is quite dated and well-known by now... ;)
The Flying Penguin: Linux In-Flight Entertainment Systems (LinuxInsider) Posted Dec 19, 2008 8:06 UTC (Fri) by simonckenyon (guest, #41836) [Link]
i was on a virgin flight last summer and the system was continuously rebooting throughout the flight; so i got to see the boot sequence quite a bit.
it is an old version of redhat. the kernel is 2.4.x (if i remember correctly). what surprised me was the error messages from the init scripts. you would have thought that they might have got rid of those.
they are using a realmagic mpeg accelerator. i wonder if that driver has been released as open source?
The Flying Penguin: Linux In-Flight Entertainment Systems (LinuxInsider) Posted Dec 19, 2008 8:08 UTC (Fri) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]
Air New Zealand's system is not Linux-based; it runs on Windows CE. Makes me wonder about the accuracy of the rest of the article.
The Flying Penguin: Linux In-Flight Entertainment Systems (LinuxInsider) Posted Dec 20, 2008 12:00 UTC (Sat) by dodocaptain (subscriber, #44818) [Link]
I recently took a flight on a plane fitted out with Air New Zealand's new per-seat entertainment on demand systems.
Before we took off, the cabin staff rebooted the system and I saw the Linux boot prompt on all the seat displays.
Once booted, and playing content, during a video at one stage there was a glitch and I saw the windows task menu appear briefly whilst watching a video.
My suspicions are that the seat computers run Linux which then establishes some kind of terminal server connection to a back-end windows server, which provides the interface and content.
Roc: I have heard from others that some of the Air NZ planes had entertainment systems based on WinCE in the past - not sure if it is still in use or if it has been replaced by the newer Linux-based system.
The Flying Penguin: Linux In-Flight Entertainment Systems (LinuxInsider) Posted Dec 19, 2008 23:54 UTC (Fri) by galah (subscriber, #52673) [Link]
Not a good advertisment. I crashed mine several times browsing on Thai earlier this year. Apparently you have to push the buttons in the correct order. It was a uclinux, 2.4 something.
The Flying Penguin: Linux In-Flight Entertainment Systems (LinuxInsider) Posted Mar 8, 2009 18:26 UTC (Sun) by anomalizer (guest, #53112) [Link]
So does Singapore Airlines and it is per seat. It was a Redhat + Panasonic derived distro. And yes, on one flight, I found it hanging repeatedly :-(
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