Rust (and Slint) on a Jailbroken Kindle

Rust (and Slint) on a Jailbroken Kindle(sverre.me)

93 points by homarp 5 hours ago | 11 comments

sandreas 3 hours ago |

This is cool, thanks for sharing. I recently compiled Rust / Slint on a LicheeRV Nano, which is RISC-V 64bit musl[1]. It's a little portable audio player I'm working on, the compile process is done via custom Cross docker image.

Currently I'm evaluating Battery Pal[2], because the TP4057 Module was not stable enough to power USB-C to 3.5mm Adapters reliably. So far it seems to work as expected.

1: https://github.com/nanowave-player/nanowave-ui

2: https://pnlabs.ca/batterypal/

FlyingSnake 2 hours ago |

Great article. Hacking old kindles is fun! I encourage everyone to give it a try. The retro feel of eink makes it special for me.

I wrote about my experience in cross compiling zig on an old kindle some time ago.

https://samkhawase.com/blog/zig-kindle-gdb/

KolmogorovComp 1 hour ago |

Tangential, how does slint fare compared to Druid/egui(?)

the__alchemist 55 minutes ago | |

I'm curious as well. My understanding is one notable differencse, exemplified here, is that Slint can work on embedded devices / no-std.

hardwaresofton 3 hours ago |

This is awesome! How reliable are kindle jailbreaks/avoiding updates, etc?

Have opted for other devices like the xteink (or a boox in the future) due to what seemed like a relatively small ecosystem around “aftermarket” kindle modifications.

The kindle would be a great option if it could be reliably jailbroken and loaded with custom software

Rebelgecko 4 minutes ago | |

One of my biggest regrets is not jailbreaking my kindle before it auto updated last year

a10c 3 hours ago | |

Depending on your firmware version, most jailbreak guides will have you either create an empty directory with the same name as the OTA firmware file (causing any OTA downloads to fail) or install an extension called `renameotabin` which renames the binaries responsible for performing the update, rendering them inaccessible.

source: https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreaking/post-jailbreak/disabl...

wilted-iris 1 hour ago | |

Worth noting that kobo devices are not locked down at all and run linux. They’re very easy to build for.

DoctorOW 3 hours ago |

This looks cool, and one of the first posts I've seen on HN in a few months where I genuinely wanted to try it.

homarp 5 hours ago |

the code: https://github.com/sverrejb/slint-kindle-backend

IshKebab 3 hours ago |

Good work! I guess you need to leave it plugged in?