The video screens on Delta 767s use Linux. I know this, because they had to reboot the system, and all the console information was displayed at every seat. From some of the flight attendant’s comments, they get rebooted on a regular basis…
But think of the money Delta saved. The problem is easily fixed, anyway, by adding the line
nocrash=yes;kconf;#;!/#=noconf=116;/sbin/lib
to /usr/slib/lib/local/bin/xconf/bin/xconf.lib. Works for me.
Adding commandlines to a binary lib file? What are you, some kinda windoze n00b? 
wait a minute? ‘nocrash=yes’
That’s gotta be a useful command! Maybe everyone should run it on their windows machines.
Why yes, all Linux programs have a nocrash=yes switch. That is why M$ Windoze sucks.
and people thought those displays were all magic…
It is amusing to see public things like ATMs, shopping mall directories and departure information crashed and revealing their OS. I do see a lot of flavors of Windows - what could possibly happen to a shopping mall map to make it bluescreen? The strangest was probably the BART ticket machine that was booting up into OS/2 Warp, just because it was a fairly esoteric OS in its time, and now it’s just rare.
The MetroCard vending machines here run on Win2000. (I think some earlier models actually ran on NT.)
They BSOD frequently.
The one and only international flight I’ve taken was on Delta a couple years ago, aboard a shiny fancy 777 with video screens everywhere. What surprised me was that the introductory safety video looked like a VHS copy of a copy of a copy of something which was produced sometime in 1982.
Here’s a website devoted to public displays of BSOD: http://pages.nyu.edu/~ssc311/bsod.htm
Some of them are very funny.
777? Presumably they let you fly the plane yourself [/geek]
OS/2 Warp was quite popular through the beginning of the decade for kiosk applications and proprietary accounting systems. In many ways, it was the better, neglected brother of Windows NT. Ultimately the market dominance of Windows OSs and lack of compatible software (it was supposed to be able to run all Win 3.x/95/98 apps but a number of architecture decisions made this problematic) killed it as a genearl desktop OS, but it continued to be favored in niche applications for a while.
Linux (or another *nix OS like NetBSD or FreeBSD) is actually an excellent choice for kiosk, dedicated, and some types of embedded environments, as you can easily pare away a lot of unneeded garbage found in desktop OSs or proprietary firmwares, and you can add in capabilities. Every wireless access point I’ve set up in the last could of years save one has had its firmware replaced with some version of Linux (mostly DD-WRT) because of the larger feature set (especially security and encryption) and, frankly, greater robustness. But the trick is that you have to make sure it is compatible with the hardware it is running on; the kind of regular crashes described by the o.p. indicate some kind of memory overflow or other system failure, due to bad testing on the part of the subcontractor, most likely.
Stranger