InkBox: a new open-source OS and eBook reader based on Qt5

[Anghirrim]

Originally Posted by elinkser

Your comment "keeping the development scene of our devices alive" - Koreader/Plato continuing to be developed, continuing to support devices, therefore keeping the development scene of our devices alive?

Ahhhh ok, thanks

[NiMa]

Originally Posted by pazos

I think you're being too pessimistic about the future of 3rd party addons on kobo.

There's no evidence whatsoever of kobo locking down the system to prevent 3rd party apps. Hell, kobo devices were not and are not meant to be secure by any metric. The are meant to be consumer commodities, who cares about it's security.

Rakuten as a company might care about their servers being hacked as everybody else. And should prevent their devices to be remotely exploited and its users data leaked. But there's no incentive for them to lockdown the userspace until Adobe requests it.

And, AFAIK, QuillOS is mostly a runtime, that would still work over stock bootloader and kernel. If you do some kernel patching to enable usb-host et al that's all that we will miss. The 99'9% of what the runtime provides would still be viable for those interested.

I think QuillOS is a pretty nice and fun project. It does provides a really awesome user experience for anybody that wants to run or port any app to their kobos. It's also an example on Qt platform abstraction.

Feel free to do whatever you want with your project, of course , but do not jump from the boat just yet, at least for this reason.

Try to have fun while we're waiting for the lockdown. If that happens I'm sure many will jump with you. I'm one of those

Thanks for your post, but sadly Quill OS has become much more than a runtime now. It's a complicated entanglement of multiple FUSE filesystems and kernel hacks, and the Qt interface is completely dependent on the host system for many things (sleeping/waking up, X11, user apps that use squashfs all over the place, etc.). There are also many security features that would become impossible to port to a device running the stock kernel, whether it would be because of incompatible modules or features or just the fact that it is not running on its own OS anymore.

Besides, the point of it is to be as open-source as possible and as independent as possible of the stock kernel/OS. I personally consider our reader app to be one of the worst ever programmed, even if I wrote it for the most part, and porting Quill as a NickelMenu extension would just not make sense to me, as KOReader and Plato are much better alternatives if you compare them to Quill just from a utility PoV. That's why, among other things, we have KOReader available as a user app for our own OS.

I hope I helped to clarify how I see the current situation... of course I would like to continue development, but it's hard to keep the motivation.

[Szybet]

Let me also add a few cents too

We have an alternative suspending process and daemon, which preserves battery better than the stock one. There is also a whole subsystem to make running apps easier and faster to port, for example the rssguard port I made doesn't have any suspend support, yet it works, it's managed externally.

Further more, I fixed many flaws of the nia A from the stock OS:
https://www.reddit.com/r/kobo/commen...mment/kt08f8n/

Also, I added support for USB keyboard, mouse and audio to Quill OS, you can find them by stalking my github

I could talk and talk what special features we added and personally used (One more: I modified the charging current from software to be better suited for using USB devices) which only show that Quill OS point was and is being a hackable platform, which was also stable to use with those hacks (No, nickel randomly made factory resets for me when trying to use koreader, it also made koreader slower over time - I tried to fix it before spending a year developing Quill OS, so no, it's was not a good experience for me, don't argue about it )

So no, it's not a runtime, it's mostly not the runtime, the runtime is the worst part of it, our reader sucks, it's the base and backend which made it special, hackable, usable

As for me, Yes, I'm pissed, I don't plan to go back to the project soon, I started to focus on a firmware for the Watchy: https://github.com/Szybet/InkWatchy and my hardware fork of it: https://github.com/Szybet/Yatchy

[NiMa]

I am pleased to announce that Quill OS has been ported (at least partly, some things are still missing and others need to be fixed) to the Kobo Libra 2.
A beta/release image should be released in the following weeks.

[w8l]

Originally Posted by NiMa

I am pleased to announce that Quill OS has been ported (at least partly, some things are still missing and others need to be fixed) to the Kobo Libra 2.

Great to see that InkBox is returning! How did you manage to get it loaded into a newer model? How much of the work could be relevant for the Clara BW and Colour models? I'd be willing to test for the Clara Colour, too.

[DNSB]

Sadly, since the Clara BW and Clara Colour have fixed internal storage, it is not possible at this time to install InkBox/Quill OS on them

[w8l]

In case it'll prove useful in the future, for the newer MediaTek-based models it may be worth a shot to try using this tool for reverse-engineering and potentially allow for flashing other OSes to them:

https://github.com/bkerler/mtkclient

[NiMa]

Yes, we used this tool a lot to try to reverse-engineer the Libra Colour's bootloader, without much success for now.
See here https://github.com/bkerler/mtkclient/issues/1332

[elinkser]

Is Mediatek really worth all the hassle (until the bootloader is unlocked)?

Whereas the Rockchip SoC got a 5022 Octane V2 score compared to 1694 for the MTK 8113T.

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/RK3566_...se-Engineering

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Rockch....741611.0.html
https://www.notebookcheck.net/MediaT....865473.0.html


Someone managed to root the Moaan InkPlam Plus.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=365328

[Lordvic]

Hi everyone. Love the work thats' gon on here.

Any tips on setting up inkobx essentially as a kiosk? Boot straight into a webpage only?

[NiMa]

Originally Posted by Lordvic

Hi everyone. Love the work thats' gon on here.

Any tips on setting up inkobx essentially as a kiosk? Boot straight into a webpage only?

Sadly, most devices are too slow for these things. I don't know exactly what you want to display, but it might possibly be too much for the CPU, especially if you want to interact with it.

[NiMa]

I am happy to announce that KOReader has been ported to Quill OS as a regular and integrated component of the GUI, though the old reader is still there with an option to switch from KOReader at will.

Hopefully, this should make Quill OS much more usable now. The reader we had was quite crappy.

KOReader will be bundled along a next release... soon.

Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-apoeVBc9WU

[chronoreverse]

Wow I want to try this when I get the Glo I lent out back.

Looking at the supported devices list, is the Clara HD different enough from the Glo HD that it's hard to support? I can understand the 2e's IMX7 and the newer devices' MTK chips not supported but I'm curious about the Clara HD's absence.

[NiMa]

The Clara HD has already been ported (kind of)
http://23.163.0.39/bundles/inkbox/native/n249/

[pascal jakobs]

Originally Posted by NiMa

I am pleased to announce that Quill OS has been ported (at least partly, some things are still missing and others need to be fixed) to the Kobo Libra 2.
A beta/release image should be released in the following weeks.

Hello
I very exited to see that. Will it be possible to install without opening the device?
MANY thanks for your work