Happened to pass thourhg here again, so I'll chip in some knowledge on the awesome thing. cause, its awesome. (please note, I have a K-touch, not PW, and really havn't touched it in like, over a year due to.. stuff. So if things are slightly wrong, or incomplete, sorry :P)
It seems Amazon did the only thing they could do: Hack everything in themselves! They modified the awesome code to send the xdamage events in through the awesome event system. If you look at the RC files, which I've done quite a bit, theres an event handler for xdamage events that basicly uses some cryptic Amazon Lua binary library to do the actual screen refreshes. Its all very messy and complicated.
Having said that, and looking through all the changes they made to awesome, I thought it was all rather pointless. What I've done on the kindle is mostly in chroot environments, since I feel 90% of what amazon did was rather unnessesary. What I ended up doing was using a standard build of awesome, and wrote a compositor to do the screen refreshes. I did try to get what I wanted through modifying Amazon's rc files, and using their version of awesome, but it just got too much for me. For example, they decided to ditch all the focusing API's for awesome, and rewrote an entire window focus system to do more or less the same things. *sigh* I modified the compton compositor and added in Geekmasters great screen refresh code, and it worked like a charm. For me, I had a seperate X11 server, and window manager all running within the chroot, though I'm sure someone could have luck with cross compiling. If you wanted to keep the Kindle's window layout and window systems, I guess you'd have to keep some of the original rc files.
Well, hope this is of use to someone.
