Today I flew back to Puerto Rico on Song Airlines (part of Delta). Every seat is equipped with a small touch-screen LCD that provides live Dish Network satelite TV, pay-per-view movies, flash games, and a music player with a selection of a couple thousand songs. While we were still on the ground in JFK they where having satelite problems so they restarted the system. It was pretty awesome seeing 170 tuxes on the top left corner of every screen.
From what I can tell every screen is a small computer. They all netboot from a server located behind first class, and mount a couple of NFS shares. The interface seems to just use the framebuffer directly, no X servers or clients. The TV and movies run much smoother than the music player and the games. I don’t know what it could mean though.
I found pictures and more info at engadget.com
When I get a car it’d be fun to try making something similar.
