Ubuntu 9.04 On Kindle 2

JO_DIE_THE_STAR_F*** writes "Jesse Vincent managed to get Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope running on the Kindle 2. The new functionality was presented in a talk at OSCON 2009."

data connection?

[quercus.aeternam]

I can't help but wonder - is the kindle's data connection still available?

And if so, on what end is the code that limits the kindle to accessing wikipedia and amazon?

Why? Because it is there?

[filesiteguy]

This is very highly cool. I wish I had the time and money to spend on such an endeavor. However, my question is - how does one get to the CLI and type in the inevitable commands that must be run to make things work??

Re:data connection?

[natehoy]

Someone on the project page asked the guy who did this if the data connection worked.

His reply was rather cryptic: "YES BUT DON'T DO THAT".

If the person who managed it is recommending against it, the very same hoopy frood with the smarts who managed to go to all the trouble to hack Ubuntu onto the Kindle, then I gotta go with "it either doesn't work well enough to bother, or there's a really good reason why you shouldn't use it if it does".

Interesting test of Amazon's Legal Dept.

[NoYob]

From their terms of use [amazon.com]:

No Reverse Engineering, Decompilation, Disassembly or Circumvention. You may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, modify, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the Device or the Software, whether in whole or in part, create any derivative works from or of the Software, or bypass, modify, defeat or tamper with or circumvent any of the functions or protections of the Device or Software or any mechanisms operatively linked to the Software, including, but not limited to, augmenting or substituting any digital rights management functionality of the Device or Software.

I wonder what the legal team will do? This is a derivative work and the guy did reverse engineer how things worked (a little) to get Linux on it.

More Books

[wembley fraggle]

I don't know why you'd particularly want to run X11 on a kindle, or certain apps. But there's definitely a space here for stuff like other eBook formats, word-processing (eInk looks great when you're outside), and improving on the general Kindle user experience. For example - the DX has PDF reading, but there's no real organization of PDFs other than by filename. What if I want to organize all my work PDFs (journal articles and whatnot) by journal, author, keyword, etc? Wouldn't it be cool if someone ported Papers to the Kindle DX?

Generally speaking, I love the Kindle hardware as a display device. The interface and user experience is pretty terrible, especially coming from a regular computer where there's always SOMETHING you can download to fix your problems.

Re:Interesting test of Amazon's Legal Dept.

[Shikaku]

Did Amazon put a lease on the Kindle? No.

It's yours. The debt was paid and you own the device. You can bash it in with a hammer if you wanted. There's nothing stopping you from doing anything to the hardware, including damaging it. There's no law against hacking hardware, and you can already put your own ebooks on it so it's a moot point that it promotes piracy like you can argue for consoles. There are laws on the effects and results it can cause, mostly to do with the FCC and radio frequencies, and other illegal things you can do with any normal computer. The EULA has no sticking power.

Now, the idea that the 3G internet connection still works is interesting. There's no login credentials. So technically you DO have unlimited access to their network, until they decide to ban your chip ID. Then someone could make a class-action lawsuit and say they gave me unlimited access, you can't ban me.

Re:data connection?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I doubt that there is any particular technical reason; but it might well be an excellent way to have the data connection cut off. Much worse, from the perspective of the linux enthusiast, who the presenter presumably is, would be Sprint, or any other carrier considering a future deal to provide a whispernet-like service, insisting on hardcore cryptographic device crippling as a condition.

Enforcing network security in the client wouldn't be a terribly good plan; but a carrier's attempt to do so could make a project like that of TFA much harder in the future.

Re:data connection?

[rm999]

Amazon presumably pays Sprint for the service connection too. My guess is Amazon pays per byte, because they charge to wirelessly transmit books to the kindle (unless you buy the book from Amazon, in which case that's baked into the price).

If my guess is true, using it purely as a browser could cost Amazon a decent amount. Fortunately for them, the browser is terrible and the screen is too slow to browse quickly.

Re:First

[bhartman34]

I can't and don't claim to be an expert, by any means, but I think the other thing you have to keep in mind is that it's a good proof of concept. If Ubuntu can be put on it, that might mean that other, slimmer distros might be able to be put on it. What if you could take Android or WebOS, rework them to move a cursor around for item selection (rather than through touch), and run that? Either of those would obviously have no problem running on a 3G network, and you'd have the kind of light apps that the Kindle should be able to handle.

Like I said, I'm not an expert, but being able to install a new OS on the Kindle does open up some possibilities, I think.

Re:data connection?

[bhartman34]

I can't say for sure, but I imagine the reason he said "YES BUT DON'T DO THAT" isn't because it doesn't work, but because neither Amazon nor Sprint intended the Kindle to use the 3G connection for heavy browsing. (Otherwise, it wouldn't be free.)

Amazon has locked people out of their store (and the Kindle accounts) before for misbehavior. Best-case scenario, if you go wild, is you'll find yourself without access to the online bookstore and/or your Amazon account. Worst-case scenario, probably, is having to pay a hefty bill for the access and losing access to Amazon and the Kindle bookstore.

Re:data connection?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's in the video. "Amazon knows where you live, who you are, and what your credit card number is."

Re:Apple has an opportunity, take it or leave it.

[xaxa]

I think the weeks-long battery life is excellent for convenience. By the time I'm leaving for work in the morning, it's too late to charge stuff up.

Also, it's much, much nicer to hold an eBook than a netbook. With a netbook on a train I pretty much have to have it on the table, but I could hold up an eBook -- the Sony one is lighter than a normal paperback (IIRC).

(I don't own an eBook. The only thing stopping me buying one is the public library, which happens to be next to my local station. And that I don't read books on my commute since I started cycling to work...)

I can think of one reason

[zogger]

Gadgets get old fast in our culture, and people move on to the next thing, meaning the old gadgets drop in price severely, and poorer folks can get them then.

  He's proven you can stick a full bloat linux distro on the thing, perhaps a few years from now when kindles start to get boring to richer short attention span people and they hit ebay for ten bucks, a lot will get repurposed because of this initial work in porting.

    Just a thought..because I'm one of those folks who waits until the richer dudes get the prices down on this, that and the other because they've moved on. A kindle today, too much, I have other priorities, a few years from now at ultracheap? I'd take one to fool around with it and make a cheap and lightweight ebook reader and browser. Or stick a zillion recipes on it and refrigerator magnets and give it to ye aulde ladee as a gift to have in the kitchen..something

I pretty much stay at the raw, bleeding, screaming dripping edge of five to ten years ago ;) shoot..I heard they got *cameras* on cellphones now..and they play music too... who woulda thunked it....

Re:Somewhat Meta.

[Tacvek]

Yes, it does, which is why it was easy enough to port ubuntu over. The real benefit here is that somebody could replace the (allegedly crappy) user interface with a new one, with proper pdf (with zoom) support, and some other features that should have been there in the first place. To code the UI for a new reader one could just use standard X11 programming techniques. That is to say, one could take xpdf, remove some of the crome of the application, and have a proper pdf reader, etc.

Annother benefit: It should be possible to ended the existing UI. For example, it should be possible to replace the crappy search with proper full text search. Doing some of that would require either breaking the DRM format, which would upset amazon, or replacing parts of the existing program. Doing the latter may be quite possible, since the code is java (IIRC), so one can just drop in replacement classes. If the java code is not obfuscated, then it may be downright easy (relatively speaking (It is always a pain to retrofit existing apps via reverse engineering)).