linux on seatbacks

KLM/Northwest flights have a seatback screen, which does help while away the long flights once the laptop battery is dead, but which I've always felt was pretty badly designed, starting with the control device which suffers from modern video game console buttonitus, with 23 buttons, two of them for changing channels (which do nothing at all normally), and one of them nicely positioned to accidentially ring for a steward if you press it while taking the control device out. Then the LCD screen itself cannot be tilted to a usable viewing angle if you're tall and the seat in front is reclined..

But the worst thing is that just after takeoff, when the system comes on and 800 bored passengers try to use it at once. In the past year, they've taken to announcing on the PA that it's normal for there to be "some delay", but that's an understatement, I've seen it take 5 minutes to respond at all to a button press. As pasengers loose interest, or manage to get a movie playing, As soon as I noticed that I assumed there was a server or servers somewhere under the hood, that handled user input, and was getting overloaded. Anyway, just another glitchy and poorly designed computer system, which unlike most such I'm forced to actually use if I run out of anything else to do in the airplane.

Anyway, if you're stuck on one of these flights, here's something to try as soon as the system comes on, while it's still in overloaded mode. I was able to reproduce it twice, but perhaps I was only lucky, or things were more broken than usual and my actions had nothing to do with the result -- I don't really know. I was "typing" ten keystrokes ahead on this laggy system, trying to get to the map display, and I accidentually started a movie. I then pressed stop, but the system was so lagged it just paused the movie and did not go back to the GUI. Normally the controller sports an "interactive" light. This light went out, and I got a channel display in its place. I flicked though dead channels, down to 1.

At this point the program seems to have crashed, as I was left staring at tux the penguin above a linux boot screen that ended with a "press enter to login". I was so suprised I recoiled from the thing, the idea that this poorly designed and broken system could be a linux machine was a shock. They must have the GUI set to respawn, since it quickly switched away and slowly started the user interface back up, which took 5 minutes. I assume normally this load happens during takeoff.

After that I did essentially the same sort of actions again, and reproduced it again, and this time read most of the boot messages, this seems to be a small embedded system using busybox, and not very well put together (some boot errors). After this second go, most people had movies playing, and the system's load went down, and I cannot reproduce it anymore. I'd be interested to know if someone else can.

Link with a fun related story.

Update: At least one other DD has seen this too, under the same circumstances.

Update 2: Micah Anderson saw a similar problem on a SwissAir flight running a slightly different system and took pictures.