It has been revealed that the new inflight entertainment systems used on Singapore Airlines upcoming A380 is based on Red Hat Inc.’s distribution of Linux.

The KrisWorld system, based on Panasonic Avionics Corp.’s eX2 in-flight entertainment, consists of a central Linux server that connects to a network of PCs installed in every seat on the aircraft. The main server, which has terabytes of storage capacity to hold the content that’s made available to passengers, streams the movies or music to the seat’s computer, which has 40G bytes of local hard-disk space and is based on a Via Technologies Inc. processor.

According to some anonymous comments on the slashdot.org website Delta airlines also uses a similar Linux system. One read said, “if you’ve flown Delta and used their in-flight entertainment machines, they’re using Redhat. I know this because I watched it crash and a subsequent reboot which was grub…”

There is also a picture over at flickr

You can read more at networkworld.com