On my last flight between Paris and Houston on Continent, I had the privilege of seeing one of the Linux Inflight Entertainment systems in action.
At first, I didn't get to see it boot up, but I did have fun playing with the music and movies on demand. It's something roughly akin to the MythTV I've grown to know and love at home.
A couple of hours into the flight, the lady in front of me rang the flight attendant and complained that her system wasn't functioning properly. The flight attendant said that she'd just "reboot" the system.
I jumped up and yelled, "Oh, mine's not working either...can you reboot mine too?!?" My wife knew what was going on, and she rolled her eyes :-)
I grabbed my camera and videoed the whole boot process. I uploaded all 450MB to YouTube in high quality (while I was onsite at Google for UDS last week):
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1-rfMBp6vw
Your impressions?
Seeing that this is a 4 minute long boot process, I'd say they have some room for improvement! On the other hand, my sarcastic side sees this befitting of all things related to the airline industry and flying...hurry up and wait for arbitrary and no good reasons...
Sorry for the bumps...
:-Dustin
Wow... that was painfully slow. It seems like they need to do some optimization. Perhaps run the system off of a flash medium or SoC. But seriously, what crappy embedded system are they running? I guess they could also do LTSP...
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