Arch Linux

renners1

Member

From: Thailand

Registered: 2004-11-03

Posts: 71

inflight entertainment running on *nix!?

Recently had the pleasure of flying on one of EVA Air's  shiney new Boeing 777 planes. The plane has a pesonal entertainment system that streams movies, music, games and interactive maps to 300 passenger screens. Very nice!

My wife was enjoying a game of Tetris when her screen crashed! Expecting to see a blue-screen-of-death, imagine my suprise when the screen showed (from hazey memory):

Sending SIGTERM to all processes
*date and time stamp*
Sending SIGKILL to all processes
reboot

Yep, looks like a *nix system! I was very suprised! Nice to see *nix handling such an intensive multi-media system. Anyone know anything more about these systems? Unfortunately I didn't see any OS name displayed, and there was no keyboard to enter "uname -a" from!!

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Microsoft stole my computer, Linux gave it back.

test1000

Member

Registered: 2005-04-03

Posts: 834

Re: inflight entertainment running on *nix!?

You should have ctrl+c'ed it! naw i'm joking...

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KISS = "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." - Albert Einstein

1c3d0g

Member

Registered: 2006-07-05

Posts: 81

Re: inflight entertainment running on *nix!?

They're probably heavily customized/stripped down versions of some Unix distro, like Irix or AIX.

Snowman

Developer/Forum Fellow

From: Montreal, Canada

Registered: 2004-08-20

Posts: 5,212

Re: inflight entertainment running on *nix!?

I could also be a Linux system. On my HP laptop, I have QuickPlay. It let you play DVD's and music files without booting any OS. There is an interface similar to a multimedia player. With cfdisk, I discovered that it was using a 200MB partition on the disk that was detected as being of the "Linux plaintext" type. So it's probably a custom/stripped Linux system.

nogoma

Member

From: Cranston, RI

Registered: 2006-03-01

Posts: 217

Re: inflight entertainment running on *nix!?

I was flying to Vegas on one of Delta's old "Song" planes, which feature a similar (perhaps the same) in flight entertainment system. We hit some bad weather that interrupted the TV feed, so they rebooted the system: lo and behold, Red Hat! Happy little tux image and everything. They had to reboot several times (I believe simply due to impatience with having the TV feed repair itself), so I got to study the boot process for through about 5 reboots 

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-nogoma
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Code Happy, Code Ruby!
http://www.last.fm/user/nogoma/

renners1

Member

From: Thailand

Registered: 2004-11-03

Posts: 71

Re: inflight entertainment running on *nix!?

Nogoma.... while searching for more info on the subject, I found this crash. Looks similar to your experience!

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Microsoft stole my computer, Linux gave it back.

dtw

Forum Fellow

From: UK

Registered: 2004-08-03

Posts: 4,439

Website

Re: inflight entertainment running on *nix!?

Royal Brunei Air uses Linux in their IFE, I saw the boot sequence severel times.  I thought it Red Hat at first...but it wasn't.

nogoma

Member

From: Cranston, RI

Registered: 2006-03-01

Posts: 217

Re: inflight entertainment running on *nix!?

Nogoma.... while searching for more info on the subject, I found this crash. Looks similar to your experience!

Looks very similar; I actually snapped a pic of the screen on my flight w/ my cameraphone, but it's super blurry (you can make out the tux logo, and some blurred text, that's about it). My brother was on the flight with me, and he leaned over from his seat and was like "Check it out! Linux!" Anyway, I guess it's not news that Linux is used in a lot of embedded applications, but it's exciting to see it "out there".

edit: Not that it really matters, but in looking at the original size of the flickr image, it's definitely a different system. The boot system on my flight looked much more like a typical Linux boot sequence.

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-nogoma
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Code Happy, Code Ruby!
http://www.last.fm/user/nogoma/

dedhart

Member

Registered: 2006-07-02

Posts: 123

Re: inflight entertainment running on *nix!?

I thought you never had to reboot linux

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Re: inflight entertainment running on *nix!?

You do sometimes. Kernel updates (frequent, that's why kexec exists!), hardware changes... And of course kernel panics, which are rather rare on systems that are up and running.

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: inflight entertainment running on *nix!?

Undercarriage malfunctions, bird strikes, wobbly drinks trolley - all good reasons to reboot as well.

test1000

Member

Registered: 2005-04-03

Posts: 834

Re: inflight entertainment running on *nix!?

and when fglrx drivers decides to hardlock your machine (although this doesn't happen anymore i believe)

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KISS = "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." - Albert Einstein

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Re: inflight entertainment running on *nix!?

You mean X lockup or a kernel panic?

1c3d0g

Member

Registered: 2006-07-05

Posts: 81

Re: inflight entertainment running on *nix!?

I thought you never had to reboot linux

No, you never have to reboot Linux, but we just do it to be cool like the Winbloze peeps.