The Amazon Kindle is another one of those immensely popular commercial devices which is built on the effort of the open source community.
The OS on the Kindle is based on Linux, and many hackers have been trying fervently to get all kinds of applications running. Now we have a hacker who has managed to get an Ubuntu environment running on his Kindle!
The Kindle runs on an ARM processor, and Ubuntu happens to have a port for the ARM. After painstaking processes to
start communicating
with the Kindle, and
getting a terminal running on it, and finally
getting root access, Jesse Vincent managed to
chroot into a Ubuntu environment. Essentially fooling a command to accept an alternate directory for its root.
After running into some problems getting an X server running on it, he managed to “bludgeon X.org into submission” and
get it running on the Kindle!
He was then able to use the famous apt-get command to get the required packages and get xdaliclock (an application which displays the current time) running on his kindle.
Jesse Vincent has also written an application called
Savory which allows for the Kindle to read pdf and ePub files without the need for any manual conversion.
Just goes to show that if you’re building your device on an open source platform, people will get much bigger bang for their buck.