I haven't been blogging about the Kindle for a while...mostly because I haven't hacked on the Kindle in a while. The release of the DX got me excited about what's possible with a device like the Kindle. I spent a bunch of time trying to get native framebuffer applications working on my Kindle 2. Yesterday, I struck upon an awful, awful idea.
Ubuntu Jaunty has an ARM target. It's a fairly similar linux to the OS shipped on the Kindle 2 and the Kindle DX. A little bit of fiddling and an NFS export later, I was able to chroot into an Ubuntu environment on my Kindle.
That was when I discovered that Lab126 have built the Kindle's kernel without CONFIG_VT...and X.org really wants a tty or virtual terminal, but not for any particularly good reason.
This evening, I managed to bludgeon X.org into submission and found myself face to face with everybody's favorite checkerboard background.
After that, it was just a hop, skip and an apt-get until I was watching the mesmerizing transitions of xdaliclock.
(Yes, I know it's incredibly blurry. I haven't managed to get the pinhole camera on my DX calibrated yet)
Clearly this is the killer app for the Kindle just a stepping stone. I still don't have the Keyboard or 5way hooked up and what I do have working is incredibly brittle. But xpdf (and lots of other stuff) runs unmodified.