So that is what Comcast are running on their cable television boxes. Of course they would run a stable and reliable operating system like Linux to make sure that the boxes work as expected, but kernel 2.4.24 in 2013? Still, the 2.4 kernels are still being maintained so they are still a worthy kernel to use for an embedded system, but the Red Hat Linux 9.0 release is very old indeed. Surely they would want to upgrade their operating system to something better. Anyway, this is an interesting photograph and shows us that Linux truly is everywhere we look. There was a photograph circulating on the Internet that showed an airline inflight entertainment system running Red Hat Linux, so who knows what else is running Linux right now. According to the thread about this topic, this might be an upstream issue and not something to do with the actual Set Top Box. Some people get different versions of Linux shown on the TTY login screen.
Something to do with the television provider instead of the actual home boxes, this would explain why they show different versions of Linux. How would you login anyway, a television box would not have a keyboard.
This video shows an inflight entertainment screen running Linux: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKMRme_Q2n4.
Another example: http://dossy.org/2008/11/saas-in-flight-entertainment-runs-on-linux-apparently/.