Just got back from a week in Istanbul - on the way out we were on an A330 - real nice plan - every seat had a personal video player in the seat ahead of it. the player had: games - single player and multiple player (trivia game) movies - about 10 or so recent releases/documentry etc.. music - 10 or so different genre and the ability to make play lists. email - wasn't working SMS - no idea - I think instant messages to cell phones (?) some other option that I can't remember now... When I first tried the system the on screen menu was very very slow... the controller of the system was about the size of the phones you'd usually see in the seats. the contoler had buttons and a small joystick like deal for moving around the screen - it also could be held sideways for playing games. Anyway, as people started using the system - more and more started to grumble - that's when I noticed that stewards were coming over and talking to the man sitting ahead of me.. He'd get up, be gone for a while then come back.... only to be interrupted again by a steward and the cycle would repeat itself... Then about 10 minutes into Matrix 2, there's an announcement that they are restarting the video system and it'll take 20 minutes to come back! whoa - that's one slow arse reboot ... about twenty minutes later the dude ahead of me comes back to hios seat and mumbles to his seat mate "that was me - sorry"... systems came back and everything was peachy... I finally flag the guy ahead of me (he was out of his seat 95 % of the trip I swear), and find out he's the "ride along" guy for testing the reaction to the new video system ... Cool! I comment on the 20 minute reboot - and then jump into trying to get more info out of him... he was kind of relucant, but parted with some info: (not a lot made sense to me but here's what I jotted down ): Token ring network computers running linux (he had no idea what a distro or a kernel was...) a disk array for video a disk array for audio no comment on the servers that the arrays are attache to each seat has a 386 under it and a 486 per each seat row (486 "watches" the 386s in it's row) 1 M ram per seat (eh??) at boot the seats get everything from the server. games are actually downloaded localy before lplaying. the multiplayer game is the most intensive app run - (??) remote acces from main terminal to every single seat computer... not much info - but nice to see linux running something like this... I only had about 5 mintues taking to him and got the feeling he wasn't too up on the nuts and bolts of the system.... the rest of the time he was out helping "customers" figure the system out... I tried a bunch of key combos - seeing if I could drop to a shell... no dice... :( next time I'm going to check out under my seat see if'n there's a serial port or some interface...:) _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list