Delta Airlines

[Jose]

My sister just got back from Germany, and called me about the Delta Airline flight that she took on the way back to the States.  Apparently, during the flight, the crew made an announcement that they had to reboot their on-board computer systems to fix a problem with the flight tracking.  As they were rebooted, a Penguin came up on all of the headrest displays and the main movie screen.  She is not a techie (outside of some casual web design) however, she recognized the Linux mascot and asked one of the flight attendants about it.  While the attendant didn't know a whole lot about the system, they did say that they were pretty sure that Delta uses Linux on a variety of systems, including the in-flight computer systems.

I don't fly Delta often, but I thought this was interesting.

-Jose

[Robert Wesley McGrew]

I've seen this a lot on cross-country flights. Each of the seat-back
computers is a small embedded Linux system. I've crashed mine before
in the trivia app, which forced it to reboot independent of the
others. It's a safe bet that the server-side of these seat-back
computers is Linux as well.

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Wesley McGrew
http://mcgrewsecurity.com

[Matthew Campassi]

That's pretty cool

I wonder if she saw something like:

http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/docs/vl50/images/vl5dyn/vd5-boot.png

That's the only thing I can imagine.

[Robert Wesley McGrew]

It looks similar (like any other booting linux kernel on the
framebuffer). I didn't immediately recognize it as being based on any
particular distro. I am pretty sure that it wasn't using X though,
and was just displaying the UI on the framebuffer.

[Jose]

Interesting to know.

You kicked the ass of the trivia app so hard that it crashed and rebooted?  You've got me impressed.

-Jose

---

From: Robert Wesley McGrew <wes...@mcgrewsecurity.com>
To: bull...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tue, February 23, 2010 12:31:12 PM
Subject: Re: [BullyLUG] Delta Airlines

[Jose]

That is very similar to what she described to me.  Could be.

And Jonathan, I agree.  I tend to think there would be many more reboots if they were running a Windows based OS.

-Jose

---

From: Matthew Campassi <lin...@gmail.com>
To: bull...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tue, February 23, 2010 12:54:10 PM

Subject: Re: [BullyLUG] Delta Airlines

[claude jones]

I saw the penguin come up on a batman movie once --- On Tue, 2/23/10, Jose <tha...@yahoo.com> wrote:

[Jose]

Did Batman have to reboot his ass?

-Jose

---

From: claude jones <claudeo...@yahoo.com>
To: bull...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tue, February 23, 2010 2:54:43 PM

Subject: Re: [BullyLUG] Delta Airlines

[claude jones]

the penguin was more than enough for him