Modifying device options on an unregistered Kindle

[ferbv]

For the past four hours, me and my good friend WinSCP have been digging into the Kindle filesystem, trying to figure out how on Earth settings are stored on this thing. So for the veteran developers here, two questions:

1. Is there a central settings storage location I'm not aware of? The closest thing I've found is /var/local/java/prefs, but those files look autogenerated and possibly incomplete.
2. Is there any way to get to the part of the Settings booklet that contains the device personalization stuff Amazon doesn't let you change without registering? The wiki has an example here that passes a parameter when launching Settings, but where did whoever wrote it get that parameter? Is there a list? Do I have to learn how to decompile JARs?

The reason I'm doing this is really because of the new home screen, which wastes more than half of its screen space trying to convince me to register my Kindle. With that in mind, my last request: if anyone here has jailbroken their Kindle, upgraded to 5.7.2, registered and disabled the home screen, could you pretty please post your /var/local/java/prefs/com.lab126.booklet.home.preferences file? Or at least tell me if and how it differs from this one:

#User preferences for Booklet Preferences
#Sat Feb 06 22:13:36 GMT+02:00 2016
FIRST_BOOT=false
HOME_FILTER_SORT_ASSOCIATION_1=title
ASR_FIRST_BOOT=false
APP_ITEMS_DELETED=true
VIEW_MODE=LIST_VIEW_MODE
HOME_V2_FIRST_BOOT=false
OOBE_DELETED=true
HOME_FILTER=1

[eschwartz]

See: Tutorial Fake-register your Paperwhite 5.2.x to use collections and other blocked features

Note the last few posts, it seems that file has changed its format slightly.

[ferbv]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

See: Tutorial Fake-register your Paperwhite 5.2.x to use collections and other blocked features

Note the last few posts, it seems that file has changed its format slightly.

I've seen that tutorial already, but it sounds like it doesn't work for the newer firmware versions. Besides, digging through JARs and poking at settings files sounds more fun.

This is what I found so far:

1. The SQLite databases in /var/local/ don't contain any settings.
2. You can launch various bits of the settings app through appmgrd using the viewRequest parameter, but only a few of them. Here are the IDs I found after a cursory look at settings.jar.
3. The diagnosticMode parameter is useless; it's only checked against ";311", ";411" and ";711".
4. Setting the get, startresult or load properties of com.lab126.booklet.settings through LIPC only managed to crash the app.
5. Adding a "HOME_VIEW" preference to the settings file I mentioned in the first post (home.jar seems to look for it) didn't do much of anything. Tried true, false, 0, 1 and 2, no change.

My apologies if this is old news to the veteran developers, but I didn't find much of anything in the way of public documentation. Also, my request still stands - if anyone has disabled their home screen, I'd love to take a look at your settings files.

[knc1]

A nice start.
You know, of course, that all of those single letter names will change with every Amazon build?

That is part of the reason Ixtab stopped working on Kindles and took a real day-job.
(Also, he ran out of excuses to stay in school when he completed his PhD.)

[ferbv]

I finally bit the bullet and registered so I could scan the system for changes, and boy, what a bullet it was.

Turns out each one of my guesses was wrong, unsurprisingly enough. I found absolutely no indication of where the home booklet gets its settings from. The only difference in the com.lab126.booklet.home.preferences file is a SHOW_KU_BANNER_FLAG entry that doesn't seem to do much of anything, /etc/deviceConfig.conf is identical with or without registration and none of the other vaguely configuration-shaped things I looked at changed in any meaningful way.

On the bright side, I can report/confirm that the jailbreak persists through hard resets. All you have to do is reinstall NiLuJe's update package.

Originally Posted by knc1

You know, of course, that all of those single letter names will change with every Amazon build?

Sure, but all I wanted to do was find out where settings are stored. Patching Amazon's .jars is way beyond my skill level.