Airport advertising sign, looks like they forgot to make the looping video full screen.
Imagine running thunderbird and firefox on an info board
a kinda old Ubuntu version ngl.
18.04 it looks like
I see
They had to reset my screen in the airplane once, booted into Linux too 👍🏼
I had an android one
Linux is pretty common in embedded devices. For example information screens in buses in my city (Kraków) which display stuff like next stops, OSM map, time, etc. run some kind of customized Linux distribution I think, and you can often see bunch of Tuxes along with console output when it boots up.
Sadly, Windows is also common in signage. Why ever.
There was that recent "malware security" update that crashed so so many systems in airports. I saw more than one Blue Screen of Death that day.
Who runs a full desktop on these things
Hey, as long as it works...
It's not running an individual desktop for each screen. The screens are just mirrored to one desktop.
You'll usually have a couple of "ad desktops" and then you just hook up multiple screens all over your facility to those desktops, so you have some redundancy and can easily run different ad cycles so they all don't sync up.
This airport
Yeah, I wonder will mpv run on its own, without any DE? At least we can run Kodi that way, but I guess at least some video players are able to run without any DE or even WM. If not all, but I’m not really sure on this.
It's totally doable from CLI. A script using either mpv - - vo=drm should be a good starting point.
I think on X server you could just use startx or xinit as well.
Not sure about mpv, but I use a gstreamer pipeline to tender cameras to the raw KMS terminal display. It works much more reliably (I.e. Predictable loading times and no stutter) compared to loading a DE first. Noting that it was on a low power RPI.
It's literally in every display you see in the world. OEMs stopped fucking with Windows years ago.
Go to any fast food restaurants with those vertical displays? Linux.
Check-in kiosks that have been deployed in the past 5 years? Linux.
Your router, most platforms you interact with online, media devices, cars (they should be using RTOS, but many use Debian), movie theaters, POS systems...
Linux is the most deployed OS on this planet by far. I'm kind of annoyed when people don't realize this.
I actually hate when engineers are just letting a desktop sit like this. It's sloppy and unnecessary.
for some reason, all these devices i see around these days seem to run android (one of 5/6/7/8 based on the exposed ui) or win10.. haven't seen any linux desktop-ish thing here
ATMs? Why, Windoge, of course! What could possibly go wrong!
The display in the underground trains of Munich and Nuremberg still uses windows. It's such a pet peeve of mine, why would they pay for a license for such a simple use case?
Bold of you to assume they are paying for a license
I saw this windows-based display just last week. Either something went wrong activating it or they don't pay
they're probably disconnected from internet, most likely misconfigured kms server or smth
Otherwise they’re an easy target for some fines, I think. It’s rather they pay the licence and nobody cares the money is wasted. And funnelled to the US, instead of staying locally.
They probably paid for some long ago, and don't want to pay again for updated versions of everything. They could probably even get away running stuff on Wine 🤣
Right, the thing that caught my eye was running a full desktop OS for a sign board.
engineers are just letting
That’s a bold claim cotton, I’m sure there are no project managers, middle managers, or executives involved
Tbf it is a lot easier to just leave the DE running than try to tweak a non DE env, especially for media playing.
Also it is probably easier for whatever IT technician to use this thing, update content, do troubleshooting, etc.
I imagine an IT technician running around pressing keys on real physical keyboards connected to all machines, instead of connecting via ssh, or even using Ansible.
Well, then they hire based on paying the lowest, then yeah, you get amateurs who don’t know shit. Can’t tell you how many situations I’ve encountered in environments like government, educational, etc. facilities where I.T. is run by the cheapest labor available. And the net result is everything runs piecemeal and haphazardly. Oh, and the average user has WAY too much privilege because they have no idea how to properly restrict access. I see it often.
I’m willing to cry over all this, I cannot understand why it works like that. It’s not cheaper, and even if you’re optimising costs, it’s still cheaper to hire one competent guy than ten incompetent ones.
You’re being logical. And you’re looking at the big picture. In budget allocated resources, they can only look at their own small box, and not think on a larger scale. Also, the people making these decisions are usually dimwits too.
Yeah this was what I was trying to get across to the other reply here. That tech is probably using VNC or something, rather than a shell over ssh. And they follow what I imagine are very bad docs from whoever built this thing, click on this, click on that, click loop video, click enable fullscreen.
And that was probably a requirement for the devs to deliver it that way. Because they know what kind of techs that customer hires to maintain these things. And anyone comfortable with Linux and the CLI is not applying for this technician job. (lol I’m making a lot of assumptions here. AITA?) This is the story I have created in my mind about this broken kiosk and I’m sticking to it.
I’m totally with you on this!
I disagree. Using a DE is more 'intuitive', but using CLI commands I way easier and effective, if you know the commands. A couple of scripts can run on cron schedules and you can just forget about it until it breaks (if it ever breaks).
For a dev/engineer/linux user, I agree. For the IT technician who probably mostly works with Windows fixing printer drivers, who every now and then has to go change the ad content on the kiosks, he probably curses “that damn Linux” every time. I’m betting for him the CLI is not easier.
As an engineer who actually made one of these systems, can confirm management drove the use of Ubuntu desktop
It is not all Linux, some are BSD based, like a lot of routerOSs
In my city's history, there's a TV that has a TV box running Ubuntu. It's always on the home screen
With Microsoft destroying it's reputation for very long device support, I can only imagine they've also destroyed all trust in them from the embedded devices and outdoors hardware industry. These machines don't get a lot of updates and it would suck to have to throw them away because software support ended.
that's an old ass version of ubuntu. here's hoping this screen has very restricted network access.
Knowing Canonical and Ubuntu it is probably still suported and it will be for the next decade.
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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