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frostschutz · 05-01-2012, 07:21 PM

You can write stuff to fb0. The web browser uses this data to re-draw the background of webpages, so you can get it to show up on the screen indirectly while the web browser is running. Which is quite useless as you can just display a web page instead.

I haven't found a way yet to talk to the display more directly; there's this flow process which is always running and which manages everything; it decides when to go into standby / charging / usb storage mode, it handles the display, it starts all the other applications. The epub reader for example does not have direct use for keyboard or display, all it does is create files under direction of the flow process, and the flow process itself then displays the rendered pages.

You could replace the epub reader with another app but to do so you'd have to figure out the protocol that the epub reader and flow use to talk to each other. It's quite convoluted.

You could replace the flow process entirely I guess but you'd lose the entire functionality of the device by doing so. As that is what the flow process does.

I suggest you get a copy of strace onto the reader (the Debian arm one works fine), and then attach it to various processes. It'll give you a rough picture of what's happening inside all these processes the reader is running.

05-01-2012, 07:21 PM	#2
frostschutz Linux User Posts: 2,282 Karma: 6123806 Join Date: Sep 2010 Location: Heidelberg, Germany Device: none	You can write stuff to fb0. The web browser uses this data to re-draw the background of webpages, so you can get it to show up on the screen indirectly while the web browser is running. Which is quite useless as you can just display a web page instead. I haven't found a way yet to talk to the display more directly; there's this flow process which is always running and which manages everything; it decides when to go into standby / charging / usb storage mode, it handles the display, it starts all the other applications. The epub reader for example does not have direct use for keyboard or display, all it does is create files under direction of the flow process, and the flow process itself then displays the rendered pages. You could replace the epub reader with another app but to do so you'd have to figure out the protocol that the epub reader and flow use to talk to each other. It's quite convoluted. You could replace the flow process entirely I guess but you'd lose the entire functionality of the device by doing so. As that is what the flow process does. I suggest you get a copy of strace onto the reader (the Debian arm one works fine), and then attach it to various processes. It'll give you a rough picture of what's happening inside all these processes the reader is running.