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AT 9:27 AM
Wednesday September 2, 2009

Kindle 2 • Linux • ubuntu

Kindle Hacking: It's a "lovely little Linux box"

I took this photo of a Kindle 2 hacked by Jesse Vincent at Foo Camp this past weekend. Apparently, aside from being a popular e-book reader, the Kindle is like Lego for Linux geeks. Here's Jesse's description of what we're looking at:

What you see there is a Kindle 2 with the Ubuntu 9.04 port to ARM running in a chrooted environment. On the screen you see xdaliclock in front of an xterm with the remains of a "top" command and a few mildly embarrassing typos.

To open up the Kindle, I used the USB networking debug mode Amazon left hanging around when they first shipped the Kindle 2, a statically linked telnetd and a cross-compiler to bootstrap myself. From there, I built a daemon that can convert DRM-free PDFs and ePubs into something Amazon's reader on the Kindle can deal with.

After that, I started to get curious about what else might be possible. It only took a few evenings to get a moderately usable Ubuntu environment running.

Mostly, the Kindle is a lovely little Linux box. Getting X working took a bit of hacking, but everything else "just works" with very little configuration.

Got that? Okay.

23 Comments

zikman

#1 – 10:50 AM September 2, 2009

you know... just cuz

kevin

#2 – 11:14 AM September 2, 2009

that's pretty sweet. Do you know if there is a way to lockdown the applications so that a user can only use it as an internet device and not toggle to any other apps??

Anonymous Anonymous

#3 – 1:29 PM September 2, 2009

I'd love to see a video of this in action... I'm trying to wrap my head around what scrolling text looks like on an eink display... Does it blank the screen (black, then white) for each line it displays? I imagine scrolling through a long directory listing would induce seizures and take several minutes.

David Pitkin

#4 – 6:05 PM September 2, 2009

Does the 3g modem still work?

Secret_Life_of_Plants

#5 – 3:01 AM September 3, 2009

I wish I was as smart as Jesse Vincent. Sigh.

Ictus75

#6 – 6:32 AM September 3, 2009

I still don't want a Kindle…

Anonymous Anonymous

#7 – 9:51 AM September 3, 2009

This is quite impressive.
Do you plan on publishing detailed instructions?

While I don't have access to a Kindle myself (not available in my part of the world), it would still be very interesting.

obra

#8 – 12:36 PM September 3, 2009

@KEVIN It's just software, but I haven't seen any special support for such a thing.

@ANONYMOUS (#3) There's a video of xdaliclock linked from my blog.

@DAVID PITKIN "Yes, but don't do that."

@SECRET_LIFE_OF_PLANTS *blush* This really has nothing to do with being smart or not...just with being too bloody-minded to have the common sense to walk away. Like most cool hacks, I stood on the shoulders of giants. In this case, igorsk.blogspot.com did the really hard bit (unlocked the kindle update format) long before I or the Kindle 2 came on the scene.

-Jesse

Grant Wagner

#9 – 1:58 PM September 3, 2009

Now of course, the real question is what's it like when you load up gsnes9x? Now THAT will really induce seizures.

Brian Fahrlander

#10 – 2:00 PM September 3, 2009

I'd be interested to see if it'd run Perl/PHP and control things onboard my trailer via the 1-wire file system. By any chance is there a GPS in it, and at least one serial port?

(A GPS would likely consume one port, the OWFS, the other)

Thanks!

interval

#11 – 2:19 PM September 3, 2009

Nice hack, man.

noobi

#12 – 2:27 PM September 3, 2009

How's the battery life w/ubuntu on that thing?

Michael

#13 – 2:48 PM September 3, 2009

Android is Linux too and already runs on ARM-11 phones. Seeing that on the Kindle 2 or the DX might get me to buy one.

Christopher Olah

#14 – 3:46 PM September 3, 2009

A few questions:

- I understand that Kindle's screen is some sort of special power-saving stays in a state until changed device. Does running X damage the display (ie, lifespan)?

- You said that the 3g still works but that you souldn't use it. Could you extrapolate? Should we not use it at all, or just not use it on anything other than Wikipedia, or just mind bandwidth so Amazon doesn't cut us off.

- In your OSCON talk, you mention that your running in a chrootable environment and that the original environment sends stuff back to Amazon. Have you stopped this? If you did, do you think that they'd kill the 3g? Have you though of overwriting the original environment?

- Have you heard from Amazon?

demuxer

#15 – 3:51 PM September 3, 2009

damn, Jesse is the man!!!

that just tell you how wrong is Amazon

nice work.

PaulR

#16 – 4:56 AM September 4, 2009

It's been done. See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILiad#Third-party_development

Just google: 'iliad' and 'linux'

LINUXdroid

#17 – 7:46 AM September 4, 2009

If you start to screw around 3g and not pay for it, you will screw it for everyone, Amazon will soooooo put the screw to the whole hackathon.

Dave

#18 – 5:29 PM September 4, 2009

The reason I don't own a Kindle is the poor experience when web browsing. This might be a solution.

Jesse, how is the web browsing experience?

Raseel

#19 – 10:50 PM September 4, 2009

This is nice !! NOW I'm really thinking of buying the Kindle 2. Awesome stuff !!

jack orsen

#20 – 11:12 PM September 4, 2009

GIANT shoutouts to CHRISTOPHER OLAH. Dude. Your an enigma, are you Asian ?

jimb12345

#21 – 6:18 PM November 11, 2009

i love my kindle but did not know that it was so easy to hack. This is so scary how easy alot of things are to hack. We need to boost our technology.
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BlogT

#22 – 7:30 PM November 15, 2009

Brings back memories of the old days. Linux is still alive!

BlogT

rwrobin81

#23 – 8:05 PM November 15, 2009

Linux box is very cute. I think that is not easy to hack. Yes i am thinking to buy that stuff

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