Running a full desktop environment on a Kindle (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Running a full desktop environment on a Kindle (2019)

nns.ee

197 pointsslondr50 comments

Link to it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx386xpDqCY

That’s way better than I imagined. Would love to have seen some keyboard feedback by typing into the terminal screen.

I think it would be much more usable as a electronic signage display, however, rather than interactive... Or if you needed to manipulate anything in detail in the GUI, it would be less awkward to do it over VNC.

This is great! I've always wanted more hackable e-ink devices -- the Kindle is nice but it feels like there's so much unrealized potential of an e-ink screen.

You might be interested in Boox, https://www.boox.com/ . They run regular Android, so it's a fairly open dev environment. (Possibly even more standard than the reMarkable)

I've been interested in their products for a while, but don't wish to support a company that violates open source licenses proudly:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/hk7d5v/onyx_is_v...

I had put a order in for a RM2, then found out about Boox and their Note Air and decided to give it a try.

Have had it for a few days now, and loving it. Went ahead and cancelled my RM2 order, the Boox seems to have the Remarkable beat in every category outside of the hardware look and supposedly it feels slightly nicer to write on, but I'm having 0 issues taking notes on the Boox Air.

The reMarkable is a pretty hackable eink device.

I’m pretty into the remarkable and run a Twitter account retweeting content. (@rehackable - inspired by the GitHub repo of the same name)

The RM1 was pretty well modded, but the RM2 is currently somewhat stuck due to a missing frame buffer driver. Some good people are working hard on it though and it seems like it’ll be solved fairly soon. [0]

[0] https://github.com/ddvk/remarkable2-framebuffer/

It suffers a lot from the low storage, which is enough to keep me from wanting one even as a consumer device, let alone to hack on it.

USD $ 450 (price) buys 72 reams of paper (amazon) which also requires a lot of storage :^)

I’ve read it’s basically a Linux box with an ssh server. Not read about running a DE/wm on it though.

Unfortunately, it's only available in limited countries[1].

[1] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000264593...

Kindle too, which doesn't stop me from using it in one of those "unsupported countries" for the past decade.

Yeah. Sucks that it does not ship to India. Feels like the 80s again, where you tell your relatives and friends to get one for you when they return from abroad.

plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Yeah, i imagine sitting out in the sun coding away. With modern laptops, you can't work even with a lamp behind you because of all the reflections.

Anti-glare coatings help somewhat (eg. most flagship Thinkpads seem to ship with them, though there’s a glossy 4K display option presumably for content creation & consumption).

First I heard of Kindles having Linux installed on them, I'm too excited by hackable e-ink device.

Seems like Kindles will have more legs than a dated iDevice.

I've never owned a Kindle, are they priced below their pure hardware cost? If so they suddenly become very tempting.

I don't know what I'm looking at but it looks like the current generation is around 50 Euros.

There's been a whole ecosystem of homebrew Kindle software on and off for a while, some of which add some nice functionality like a better PDF reader. Not sure about current status of efforts, but I played around with it a few years ago and it was reasonably lively back then.

Amazon offers a "subsidized" version with some minimal ads that is $20 cheaper, that suggests to me that they are selling it at cost or at least near it. Incidentally, I kinda like the ads... they aren't intrusive (to me at least) and they have actually have given me some decent recommendations before.

Keep the ads! At least they are book covers. The non-ad version has horrible lock screen images.

Agreed, I've discovered a few interesting books thanks to the ads. And they are no more intrusive than the non-ad lock screens.

Amazon is still offering Kindle's with lifetime cellular connectivity [1]. I'm not sure what kind of arbitrage possibilities exist here...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/All-new-Kindle-Paperwhite-Waterproof-...

Pretty limited. The cellular connection only connects to amazon.com and Wikipedia

The Kindle also comes with an "Experimental Browser". [1] I've used it on an old Kindle to read the news, craigslist. I'm not sure if it supports JS.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q7eHUI6rSo

I once drove 10 hours to visit a friend but my phone was dead on arrival. I had his address but no apartment number. I used the Kindle experimental browser to message him on facebook.

The big problem with the Experimental Browser on my beloved Kindle DX is that it doesn't seem to support tls/https.

Otherwise I'd use it a lot more.

It's been probably a couple of years, but I tried to load HN in it once and it was unreadable, so I don't think it's too great.

I read HN on my Kindle's browser fairly regularly. HN itself (and similar pages with a simple layout, such as i.reddit.com) works great. For the articles that are linked, it's a coin flip whether it works or the page has so much cruft that it crashes the browser.

I used to use the built-in browser to load Google Voice and Google Talk and they worked fine. Of course, this was before they were overhauled into bloated, JS-heavy pages that barely run on non-Chrome mobile browsers.

You can write a proxy that creates a new page on Wikipedia with the requested URL. A remote machine then monitors the page, downloads the URL, and adds to a new Wikipedia page.

I think the Wikipedia editors would ban the proxy's IP pretty quickly for making junk pages.

I imagine they track usage and block accounts that abuse the service.

Everything old is new again.

https://gizmodo.com/amazon-kindle-2-hacked-to-run-linux-5351...

I would think an i3-type WM would work better since there's less need to move windows around.

Obviously a valuable project to know about when you don't have enough dead badgers to hand.

https://everything2.com/title/How+to+install+Linux+on+a+dead...

(Originally documented in Strange Horizons magazine, but the original source appears to be offline.)

Ahh, a classic. Original source is still online: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/installing-l...

That's cool and all, but if you have a dead beaver you can put a whole computer in it:

https://www.instructables.com/Compubeaver---%3E-How-to-case-...

...and all I wanted was to change the default screensavers, damn you Amazon :-(

Easily possible! Check out the mobileread forums.

It _used to be_ easy, I did it on an old Kindle ages ago. Last I checked, it was much harder on the Voyager I currently use, and it would get lost at every OS update.

Probably could get something like this running with deboostrap[1] if you prefer Debian over Arch.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/Debootstrap

Woah, it's been 8 years now since I've ran Debian on Kindle Paperwhite in pretty much the same way :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHoPgXb-JNM

I wonder if it's good enough to run a paint app for note taking like experience.

But does it run doom? On pocket book with eink is possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0apFspOlK10

Just a note that this post (and accompanying Youtube video) are from early 2019. Not taking away anything from this accomplishment of course, just FYI.

Yeah but can it run kubernetes? /s

Insanely cool.

wow that is surprisingly not terrible

Way better than expected.

Day 192 of lockdown.

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