Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Linux flies on Delta
Last time I went skiing in Utah (gosh, it seems like a year, and it was ten days ago...) I was impressed by the video system. It had live Dish TV, exactly as JetBlue (that sports DirecTV). A tons of CDs of quality music (and I could plug in my iPhone headset) and games. In particular, I liked the multi-player game, very cool because you play against the other passengers and you know who owns the highest score (it gives you the seat number).
On my way back, I was a bit less impressed when the thing in front of me rebooted. I noticed only mine rebooted, the others were working. Then one by one, most rebooted. I probably was the only one not swearing, but looking at the boot process: it had a penguin in it.Cool to see the penguin. Much less cool to see it five times in a 90 minutes flight. I believe I have seen Linux automatically reboot more times on that flight that in my entire life. Who wrote that application??
Posted by Fabrizio at 17:14
2 Comments:
FloJr said...
Interesting post, as I am intrigued by inflight entertainment systems. Since I'm usually on short-hop flights, I don't get to see them very often. After a little bit of digging, I found this article on linux.com. Apparently it's a Red-Hat based system called eX2 by Panasonic Avionics.
Neat, except the fact that I've never heard a linux-based system reboot that many times... and other blogs suggest that it's not an uncommon occurrence. Hopefully, they'll have ironed out the bugs the next time I get on a flight with these systems.
Comment Posted at 12:03
Mordy said...
These are the old Delta Song Boeing 757-200 planes.
Song Airlines had fantastic in flight entertainment (loved that trivia game when flying from NY to SF), and it was actually one of the few airlines to go under that I'm sad about.
I was just starting to tell people to try them out when they disappeared...
The planes all got absorbed into Delta's regular fleet, however, so every now and then you'll get one of these cool touch screen linux screens when flying Delta... Sadly, there's no way to tell when you book your flight which plane you'll get.
Its been a while since I've seen one, good to hear they're still using them!
(Although Virgin has a similar touch screen interface based on variants of Red Hat & Fedora-
They also offer a seat-side qwerty thumboard for inter-seat chats, and plan to offer limited internet/messaging services using it soon. Cool stuff...
http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/03/27/all-about-linux-2008-penguins-fly-an-interview-with-charles-virgin-airs-head-of-in-flight-entertainment/
)
Not surprised to hear they reboot them alot... I don't think Delta kept much of the technical support for these specific planes, so when stuff goes wrong I doubt they are really trained to fix it.
When all else fails, reboot... even on linux, I guess...
