I love flying in airplanes with personal entertainment monitors in the seats. The flight is so much more enjoyable when you can select the entertainment instead of being at the mercy of the airline’s movie de jour. The last two times I’ve had access to them, however, they have had stability issues. The first time, the system had to be rebooted about 5 times. This last time, the problem only required two reboots… but this time, I had the camera ready.
As you can see from the photo below, the client runs on Linux. From the way that all of the monitors rebooted in unison and the messages that scrolled past during boot, each monitor appears to be a simple remote console to a central server (which makes the most sense – I wouldn’t expected a full PC to be integrated into the seat). It’s pretty cool, but not quite as stable as I think it should be.
I’m just glad the computers in the cockpit run on a different system. Having to reboot at 500 miles per hour would be a bummer. :^)
Haha, bummer. Must be some instable software or hardware related problem. Too bad.