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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.'"

27 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Ob by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wheareas Arab airlines use 72 virgins...

  2. Old news by antifoidulus · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    Monstar L
    1. Re:Old news by Jafar00 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      RebateFX.com - Spread rebates for Forex traders
    2. Re:Old news by alpharouge · · Score: 5, Funny

      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... :)

    3. Re:Old news by Idiomatick · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    4. Re:Old news by my+$anity++0 · · Score: 2, Funny

      Only if they look. Or use Gentoo.

    5. Re:Old news by HonIsCool · · Score: 2, Informative

      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... ^_^

      --
      "Give me six lines of C++ code written by the most competent programmer, and I will find enough in there to hang him."
  3. Oh dear. by Funkcikle · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!"

    1. Re:Oh dear. by fat_mike · · Score: 2, Funny

      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!!!!!!!!

    2. Re:Oh dear. by jamesh · · Score: 4, Funny

      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...

  4. Microsoft Gorilla Propganda. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  5. 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...

  6. Virgin America... by spidr_mnky · · Score: 5, Funny

    Virgin America Uses Linux... Just for a moment, I thought this referred to a demographic.
  7. Unix-like OS's are common in that application by MichaelSmith · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  8. Re:that figures by Nullav · · Score: 4, Funny

    Associating Linux with a successful brand is a Good Thing for Linux
    But we already have people associating Linux with virgins. Hardly a contribution.
    --
    I just read Slashdot for the articles.
  9. Yeah it's kind of sad by amake · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Yeah it's kind of sad by MentalMooMan · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      --
      43rd Law of Computing:
      Anything that can go wr
      fortune: Segmentation violation -- Core Dumped
  10. My TV set runs Linux by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The LG TV 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.

    --
    Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
  11. Fail! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    You missed such an easy one-liner:

    "Linux America Uses Virgins to Entertain Inflight"

  12. Re:that figures by IchBinEinPenguin · · Score: 5, Funny

    But we already have people associating Linux with virgins. Hardly a contribution.br
    http://www.bbspot.com/News/2000/9/linux_laid.html

    Read it and weep bitter, bitter tears of envy!

  13. Virgin UK using it for years by Harold+Halloway · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  14. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  15. Several features not available by sonofabeach · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Lose 20 pounds, instantly! Just send £20 to... - Bizarro
    1. 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.

  16. at use in other airlines as well by Nova · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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).

  17. 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

  18. Charisma by srobert · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.