KindleTERM - a SSH client kindlet

[janvanmaar]

the keystore is not accepted by 3.0.3:

The device is not registered as a Test Kindle to run this title. Please ask the developer to add this device to the list of registered Test Kindles.

[troyme]

It's working on DX us.
the default root passwd is fionad13.
Have fun!!

[troyme]

is it possible to change the console display font ??? because east asian charactar displayed odd with the default font.

[cm0nster]

this does not work on a kindle 3 with firmware 3.0.3, because the key signing is not accepted.

[kdgarris]

Is this far enough along to play NetHack successfully on a public NetHack server? If anyone wants to try, nethack@nethack.fi password nethack is one. If this works, then a native port of NetHack on the device should be doable using this terminal for display. :-)

[pyite]

Great job getting this going! I am able to ssh to localhost, but not to other hosts. However, from the localhost shell I have no problem shelling to other machines - other than the keyboard issues. For example, navigating the symbol popup moves the cursor, so it's impossible to type a password that has numbers in it.

How is the development coming along?

[kranu]

Originally Posted by pyite

Great job getting this going! I am able to ssh to localhost, but not to other hosts. However, from the localhost shell I have no problem shelling to other machines - other than the keyboard issues. For example, navigating the symbol popup moves the cursor, so it's impossible to type a password that has numbers in it.

How is the development coming along?

You know you can type numbers with the alt key.

Alt Q = 1, Alt W = 2, Alt E = 3, and so on..

Of course, that only handles numbers, not other characters.

[troyme]

It seems that kindleTerm not work at the latest 2.5.7 firmware on kindle Dx us

[vdp]

Hi everyone,

sorry for not responding on this thread. The KindleTERM project was just a proof (or as it turned out in my case disproof) of concept. Basically I wanted to see if I can use the kindle's screen as a second display, that would potentially make easier to my eyes to study text-based documents(e.g. source code). Unfortunately it turned out (for me at least) to not be the case.
So I do not intend to maintain and evolve the code.
The source is available on github so if anyone knowledgeable in Java programming is interested you are wellcome to use the code as a starting point.

[hawhill]

Thanks for generously offering your code. I took the chance and started working on it a bit. Well, to be honest, most of this work was stripping the sources down so I could take a look at how it works. But I thought that someone else might be interested in these stripped-down sources, or even the resulting Kindlet.

What I've changed:
- dropped the remote control interface for keyboard input
- dropped SSH support altogether
- enabled Telnet support
- dropped the interface for setting up hostname, user, password
- instead immediately do Telnet to localhost
- extended keyboard handling: combinations for symbols, mode switching

Short description of the keyboard handling: When holding down "Aa", pressing regular keys will produce symbols (see attached image for the corresponding K3 keymap). By pressing the middle button of the directional pad, you can toggle through modes, 1st is the symbol mode as if Aa was pressed, 2nd will send the following key with CTRL modifier, 3rd with ALT modifier, 4th with CTRL and ALT modifiers. Input modes are indicated in the title bar.

Rationale:
I just wanted a simple terminal and I did not fancy the native-code ones very much. SSHing to localhost did not make much sense when we can do telnet instead. SSHing to other hosts can be done from the command line.

You will (probably, in fact I did not really try...) need the changes to /opt/amazon/ebook/security/external.policy as indicated in the OP.

The .azw2 in the ZIP is signed with the keystore you can find in the ZIP and the source tarball. See my Sudoku kindlet post to learn how to combine keystores: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=114691 (I used the same keystore there, BTW).

And, of course, you will need to have telnetd running on your kindle. That said, you will most probably want to just setup and enable USB networking support.

BTW, a vt320 terminal should be backwards compatible to vt100 and vt200.
For the future, I'm planning to compile GNU screen and have that running in the background to have re-attachable shell sessions.

Feel free to further hack on the code!

[dubaaron]

Thank you so much hawhill. This is awesome.

Upon first copying to the device, and then doing a dbus-send to refresh my home screen, it gave me the "the device is not registered as a Test Kindle to run this title ..." problem. But after a full restart, it let me into the app. (Maybe needed to refresh the keystore? Maybe a framework restart would have done this, but I haven't figured that out yet, though I know it's been documented in these forums).

However, now all I get is a blank screen (with titlebar displaying "KindleTerm") with a cursor and a "c" character at top left. I can move the cursor around, and type, but not much interactive seems to be going on.

I suspect maybe I don't have telnetd running?

I installed the usbNetwork hack and can ssh in, and I've also been using @lrizzo's fabulous "myts.arm" for a terminal as well ... I guess I assumed those would include telnetd. Maybe I'm wrong?

How do I start telnetd? Hmm doing a find on my kindle for telnetd comes up with no results ...

EDIT/UPDATE:
I applied the changes to the security policy file as noted in the original post (NB: need to "mntroot rw" first, and then "mntroot ro" when done), and now it seems to work.

Though for whatever reason it didn't draw the whole screen. I had to type in a few commands first and then magically the screen output appeared -- the "c" that I originally got is from the "Connecting ..." line at top.

So it seems telnetd must be running. Perhaps my find command syntax was off. I still do a "find . -name 'telnetd'" and nothing comes up. Hmm.

One thing that myts.arm does, which would be handy, is to have the keymap displayed heads-up on-screen while the terminal is invoked, to remember the keyboard shortcuts. Or at least optionally.

But hey, I'm not complaining.

This way I can get a terminal without first logging in remotely with ssh and starting the "myts.arm"

Muchas gracias, vielen dank.

[dubaaron]

Originally Posted by janvanmaar

the keystore is not accepted by 3.0.3:

The device is not registered as a Test Kindle to run this title. Please ask the developer to add this device to the list of registered Test Kindles.

Did you try a full restart? I got that error before I restarted. I'm using 3.0.2 though.

[dubaaron]

Another difference between this and myts.arm is that if I go back to the Kindle UI, and then come back to the kindlet, it starts a new session. I lose my terminal session. Myts.arm is handy that you can switch it on and off.

Just observing aloud here.

[dubaaron]

Please post us when you get "screen" compiled -- I found myself wanting that as soon as I got a shell on the kindle!!

[PoP]

Originally Posted by dubaaron

.[snip]...
However, now all I get is a blank screen (with titlebar displaying "KindleTerm") with a cursor and a "c" character at top left. I can move the cursor around, and type, but not much interactive seems to be going on.

I suspect maybe I don't have telnetd running?

I installed the usbNetwork hack and can ssh in, and I've also been using @lrizzo's fabulous "myts.arm" for a terminal as well ... I guess I assumed those would include telnetd. Maybe I'm wrong?

How do I start telnetd? Hmm doing a find on my kindle for telnetd comes up with no results ...

EDIT/UPDATE:
I applied the changes to the security policy file as noted in the original post (NB: need to "mntroot rw" first, and then "mntroot ro" when done), and now it seems to work.

Though for whatever reason it didn't draw the whole screen. I had to type in a few commands first and then magically the screen output appeared -- the "c" that I originally got is from the "Connecting ..." line at top.

So it seems telnetd must be running. Perhaps my find command syntax was off. I still do a "find . -name 'telnetd'" and nothing comes up. Hmm.
...[snip]

Well, I have the same symptoms. hawhil's KindleTerm cannot telnet to localhost on my Kindle because there is no telnetd process running though I have usbNetwork v0.30n up and alive. The Kindlet stays on "Connecting to 127.0.0.1".

I SSHed over the wifi interface and asked BusyBox :

[root@kindle /]# busybox
BusyBox v1.7.2 (2010-10-10 13:35:11 PDT) multi-call binary
Copyright (C) 1998-2006 *Erik Andersen, Rob Landley, and others.
Licensed under GPLv2. *See source distribution for full notice.

Usage: busybox [function] [arguments]...
or: [function] [arguments]...

BusyBox is a multi-call binary that combines many common Unix
utilities into a single executable. Most people will create a
link to busybox for each function they wish to use and BusyBox
will act like whatever it was invoked as!

Currently defined functions:
[, [[, addgroup, adduser, adjtimex, ash, awk, basename, bunzip2, bzcat, cat, chgrp,
chmod, chown, chpasswd, chroot, clear, cmp, cp, crond, crontab, cut, date, dd,
delgroup, deluser, df, dirname, dmesg, du, echo, env, expr, false, fbset, fdisk,
fgrep, find, freeramdisk, getty, grep, gunzip, gzip, head, hexdump, hostname,
hwclock, id, ifconfig, ifdown, ifup, install, ip, kill, killall, klogd, less,
ln, logger, login, logname, losetup, ls, makedevs, md5sum, mkdir, mkfifo, mknod,
mktemp, more, mv, nc, netstat, nice, nslookup, passwd, pidof, ping, pipe_progress,
pivot_root, printf, pwd, rdate, readlink, realpath, renice, reset, rm, rmdir,
route, run-parts, sed, seq, sh, sleep, sort, start-stop-daemon, stat, strings,
stty, su, sync, tail, tar, tee, telnet, test, time, touch, tr, traceroute, true,
tty, udhcpc, uname, uniq, unzip, uptime, usleep, vi, wc, wget, which, who, whoami,
xargs, yes, zcat

...only the telnet client, no telnetd daemon.

Like yourself I have applied the security policies and myts.arm works fine. Also VDP's original KindleTerm can ssh to localhost.

All I can think is that the telnet daemon has been removed from this version of usbNetwork. But then you said your KindleTerm started to work at some point ... I wonder what triggered it?