Full blown linux alpine on Kindle Scribe?

[Aadvik5951]

It looks like charging from a wall socket is perfectly fine.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

If you take the link you wrapped in [IMG]...[/IMG] tags and either copy/paste it into your browsers address bar or wrap it in ..., it will work. A lot of image sites no longer allow 3rd party viewing of images. My personal preference is uploading the image to MobileRead using the paperclip or Manage Attachments. Too many message with old images that were loaded to sites that no longer exist or no longer allow 3rd party image viewing.

https://postimg.cc/dZ95pH1s/21729c7c

And because the images are no longer available, the thread can be worthless.

[kbarni]

Originally Posted by kaspar

I would pay $100 towards a developer getting OTG USB or Bluetooth keyboard support working on the Scribe. I'm sure others would contribute as well. The work has already been started if you search the forums, but it was about a decade ago if I remember correctly.

Well, to get USB OTG, probably the easiest way would be to obtain the kernel sources from Amazon (as per GPL2 license) and rebuild it by enabling the USB host drivers. And/or the Bluetooth HID drivers.

While I already used custom kernels on other devices, I'm not really keen on testing them on the Kindle. A bad move, and it's bricked; not possible to switch the SD card for a new system (as on a Raspberry Pi). Replacing it would almost cost the $100.

If you want an e-ink tablet for serious writing/note-taking, probably a Remarkable 2 with keyboard folio is a much better adapted solution. (that's what I'm also thinking of getting)

[kaspar]

I have been advocating for some form of Kindle recovery that is first on the boot order list. It would show on every hard boot for five seconds before continuing a normal boot sequence. In those five seconds you could enter recovery with SSH or anything that could access the NAND. Or if NAND images could be booted (Emulated NAND) like on the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo 3DS, we could tinker as much as we like while being safe.

[kbarni]

BTW, did anybody manage to mount the Kindle partition from Alpine? What filesystem does it have? I tried ext2, but even after installing e2fsprogs, I get:

# mount /dev/mmcblk0p10 /mnt
mount: /mnt: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/mmcblk0p10, missing codepage, or helper program, or other error

fdisk -l recognizes it as "Linux filesystem", and fsck also complains about "Bad magic number of superblock"

[kaspar]

Originally Posted by kbarni

BTW, did anybody manage to mount the Kindle partition from Alpine? What filesystem does it have? I tried ext2, but even after installing e2fsprogs, I get:

# mount /dev/mmcblk0p10 /mnt
mount: /mnt: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/mmcblk0p10, missing codepage, or helper program, or other error

fdisk -l recognizes it as "Linux filesystem", and fsck also complains about "Bad magic number of superblock"

This warning from the original Alpine Kindle github page may or not be relevant, but as someone who bricked a Scribe NAND, please give it a read just in case:

WHILE ALPINE IS RUNNING / THE IMAGE IS MOUNTED, DO NOT CONNECT YOUR KINDLE TO THE COMPUTER WITHOUT USBNETWORK ENABLED! The image resides in /mnt/us, and that is your usb mass storage location. When Alpine and the computer write on the userstore partition (partition 4) at the same time, it will be destroyed, and you need to fix that partition to get your Kindle working again. It might even be possible to brick the Kindle!!! Kual has an option to show the USBNetwork status, so check that beforehand if you plan on doing SSH while Alpine runs.

[Frogm4n]

Yeah, mounting the already mounted filesystem is a bad idea. Also, mounting Kindle partition from inside of the Linux chroot that is already being hosted in the file containing the Linux filesystem sounds like a recipe for disaster. Best to just use a bind mount like the script already does for the dirs of interest. Bind mounting / itself also sounds like a recipe for disaster. Remember, this is a chroot, not a container or emulator.