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Virgin America Uses Linux to Entertain Inflight

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the slow-steady-creep dept.

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.'"

3 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Re:that figures by IchBinEinPenguin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...

  2. NetBSD @ Panasonic Aviations by hubertf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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/

      - Hubert
          Author or g4u

  3. Re:Several features not available by zenyu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.