One reason the iLiad is easy to brick is that the setup requires the GUI to be functioning before any user interaction can take place. For most of my projects with embedded systems I always enable the ethernet and sshd long before we try to start up the gui so that we have a way in if things go wrong.
To that end, attached is a tar file that you can unpack in the root directory that will enable the ethernet with a static IP (10.0.0.200) and start sshd so that you can login as root over the network. The root password is set to 'rootme', in keeping with the Familiar distribution, you'll need to change it once you log in.
The network comes up about 1/2 the way into the boot process, then sshd is enabled about 3/4 of the way, as measured by the little bar graph on startup. There does not seem to be any increase in the time to boot. I do not know how much power the ethernet draws, but I know it is much less than the wireless. There may still be some reduction in battery life, but you could easily add an shell hack entry to turn it off. A simple 'ifdown eth0' will also unload the smc91x module.
One important note -- the iLiad does not have bzip2, so you will have to uncompress it on your Linux box before installation. One way to do that is to combine the decompress with the unpacking:
Code:
bzcat unbrickable.tar.bz2 | ssh root@ereader tar -C / -xvf -
The file manifest in the tar file is:
Code:
-rw-r--r-- root/root 319 2007-04-01 11:28:31 ./etc/network/interfaces
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2007-04-01 11:36:55 ./etc/dropbear/
-rwxr-xr-x root/root 427 2007-04-01 11:36:55 ./etc/dropbear/dropbear_dsa_host_key
-rwxr-xr-x root/root 460 2007-04-01 11:36:55 ./etc/dropbear/dropbear_dss_host_key
-rwxr-xr-x root/root 424 2007-04-01 11:39:13 ./etc/init.d/dropbear
lrwxrwxrwx root/root 0 2007-04-01 11:40:54 ./etc/rc5.d/S98dropbear -> ../init.d/dropbear
-rwxr-xr-x root/root 214442 2007-04-01 11:37:28 ./usr/bin/dropbear
-rw-r--r-- root/root 732 2007-04-01 11:43:49 ./etc/passwd
Adam B. Edit:
Post Updated with most recent version of Unbrickable package (unbrickable.tar.bz2) with dropbear 0.49 with scp.
See this post
Also Updated with ipkg installer package w/ dhcp.
See this post