This is a of a post made during a time where outgoing federation for lemmy.ml was broken. I hope lemmy.ml readers will forgive me for shoving my filthy little words under the shining gaze of their precious and observant eyes for a second time.
I have a Kindle Paperwhite (7th generation). (Stallman weeps) It appears people generally customize their kindle beyond Amazon’s original design by jailbreaking it. But I was wondering if I could replace the entire system on the kindle by a new one, for even more hacking fun.
It appears Kindle Paperwhites run on ARM processors, so there should be plenty of compatible software. However, it appears flashing the ROM of kindle only appears in the context of something called the Kindle Fire. Why is that? Is there any reason ROM flashing for the paperwhite kindles isn’t common? The only reasons I could think of is that disassembling and reassembling the kindle paperwhite is kinda annoying (especially with the glue holding the case together) and that maybe not everyone has a board to externally flash ROMs. I’ve also thought that maybe the ROM is write-protected or that the software is signed and that the Kindle will refuse to boot off of anything that hasn’t received Jeff’s blessing. Is there any existing guide on flashing a custom ROM? Have any ROMs been created already?
Maybe my foolish self has not searched good enough and hasn’t found the discussions on ROM flashing of other kindle models, but in any case I think it’s good to have this discussion on here on Lemmy too even if it potentially already exists somewhere else on the internet, so that other fools like me may come across your wisdom and be enlightened.
If this is complete and utter nonsense what I’m babbling about, can I at least somehow download the firmware and software running on the kindle from the device, so that I may poke and probe it with my disgusting, dirty little fingers, defiling Amazon’s intellectual property?
I hope that you have a good day and that the following days be good too. If I am stupid for even mentioning the idea of a good day, I wish that some day our suffering may end and that a good day be something we all can look forward to.
Not sure of the hardware specifics, but “ARM” is not saying anything significant. You have to see if the specific processor used has mainline support in the present or in a past kernel that you can use.
For instance, Android is a scheme where google takes a Linux kernel, strips absolutely everything they can out if it and documents thoroughly. All the thing can do is run the app environment, but the kernel is incomplete with no hardware support. All the manufacturer must do is add the hardware support modules at the last possible moment. This makes it possible for manufacturers to only add binary support modules. The entire arrangement is designed to exploit the end user with these orphaned kernels and hardware you can never own. The hardware is undocumented anywhere, and each device is different enough that reverse engineering one will do nothing for supporting the next.
I’m not saying your device has an orphaned kernel, but this is what to look for in any device. Mainline kernel support means full ownership. Proprietary is always theft of ownership.