Linux on the Boeing 777

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Jim Logajan

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Wife and I took a trip to England, and on the return trip we were in the sardine section, but they had nice little entertainment displays in the seatbacks of the B777 we flew on. I had never flown on a B777 before, so found it interesting that they had a map mode that showed where the jet was at all times, including altitude, ground speed, and the amount of head or tail wind. The fact that the altitudes stayed within a 2 or 3 feet of the thousand-foot flight levels indicated to me that the value was from the barometric altimeter and not from GPS readings.

After landing while waiting to leave the jet the power cycled on the rows we were sitting in (didn't happen to all seats, just a few) and that is when I saw the Linux penguin logo and boot sequence appear on our screens. Seemed slow to boot - looked like they built the kernel with a lot of presumably irrelevant drivers included. (Maybe they wanted to avoid GPL tainting of anything else they wrote, even if it was just an application program?)

If someone had asked me to guess the OS behind their entertainment centers, I would have said BSD, Solaris, or even Windows.

(I see by a Google search the Linux on B777 is already known.)
 
Got delayed out of Hawaii a couple of years ago waiting for maintenance to find the CD to reload that system. Apparently it's also tied to the courtesy lighting above each seat, and they couldn't get any of those to come on. :rofl:
 
That's a customer-supplied, Panasonic-produced IFE system. Widely used in the industry on Boeing, Airbus, and some various RJs. It's pretty god-awful.
 
Linux is in the ton of gadgets. Lots of picture frames run it, for example. And I am only talking about something easily recognized as Linux (e.g. glibc, Busybox). Android is different, obviously.
 
The really good Linux engineers know how to hide that it's Linux.

Leaving the tux logo on the display along with the kernel boot messages on an embedded system is pretty lame, actually. That thing should be much more stripped down than that. The output from the ring buffer to the screen should be disabled unless it's in a troubleshooting mode.

The boot should be hidden unless needed and branded to your company's logo(s), since showing tux's cute little fish-filled belly isn't going to sell units, especially to anyone with a decent embedded Linux engineer on staff reviewing the product.

Leaving drivers loading that are unused on an embedded system is beyond retarded.

Someone is seriously lazy. On both the on-board entertainment vendor's part and whoever didn't have a real Linux engineer look over the product the airline was purchasing.

Cheesy. Super cheesy. Almost unprofessional. I haven't done embedded systems in a while now that I'm back to real "iron" and virtual "iron" but that's just a sign they did a serious rush/hack job.
 
denverpilot said:
The really good Linux engineers know how to hide that it's Linux.

Leaving the tux logo on the display along with the kernel boot messages on an embedded system is pretty lame, actually. That thing should be much more stripped down than that. The output from the ring buffer to the screen should be disabled unless it's in a troubleshooting mode.

The boot should be hidden unless needed and branded to your company's logo(s), since showing tux's cute little fish-filled belly isn't going to sell units, especially to anyone with a decent embedded Linux engineer on staff reviewing the product.
[snip].
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You are laboring under the assumption that most of the people that make the buying decisions are (1) smart enough to have good engineers advising them re embedded systems and (2) smart enough to listen to good advise.
 
Bob Noel said:
You are laboring under the assumption that most of the people that make the buying decisions are (1) smart enough to have good engineers advising them re embedded systems and (2) smart enough to listen to good advise.
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Nope, exactly the opposite. I know they typically don't, and they're typically not.

Cleaning up other people's computer system messes has been a pretty lucrative career so far.

Been trying to figure out how to take it to the next level, but I don't golf or kiss ass well enough. ;) ;) ;)

For now, my business card still reads, "Linux Systems Janitor". :D
 
I heard somewhere that the system being installed on the 787 will be based on Android....
 
denverpilot said:
Nope, exactly the opposite. I know they typically don't, and they're typically not.

Cleaning up other people's computer system messes has been a pretty lucrative career so far.

Been trying to figure out how to take it to the next level, but I don't golf or kiss ass well enough. ;) ;) ;)

For now, my business card still reads, "Linux Systems Janitor". :D
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Ahh... So we're in the same business. Luckily we have a couple of golfers and one guy who kisses ass about as well as I've ever seen. I'm too "honest" to kiss any ass. Our main business is normally, "Our old guys are out of business, what do we need?" or "We've been running this Excel/Access app for a few years..." :hairraise:
 
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