It's School time: Adventures in hacking an old Kindle

Summary

It was Monday and my daughter was late for the school again. To make things worse, the bus came early by 2 minutes. After rushing and making sure she caught the bus on time, I sat down for my morning coffee and opened up Hacker News. The front page had an interesting entry: “All Kindles can now be jailbroken”. Curiously my old kindle was lying next to me. Was this a sign from the universe? There was only one way to know and thus began my journey to turn my kindle into a get-ready-for-school dashboard. Level 1: Jailbreaking the Kindle ⛓️‍💥 Jailbreaking the kindle was a relatively easy process. The fine folks at kindlemodding.org have created a user friendly guide with easy step by step instructions. The guide is very comprehensive and user friendly so it would be futile for me to repeat the steps here. The KindModding Discord community is also a great place to ask for troubleshooting. In a nutshell the main steps I took to jailbreak my kindle were: Identify your kindle model. Install WinterBreak. (Just place the zip file in the kindle and reboot.) Setup a hotfix, i.e. make sure the jailbreak persists after updates. Install the Kindle Unified App Launcher and a package installer (MRPI) Enable SSH on the Kindle using USBNet package. Network shenanigans ☎️ I hit my first roadblock while setting up SSH access for the kindle. The standard USBNet package did not work for my kindle and after some research I found USBNetLite which got the SSH working. The USBNetlite package enables connection to the kindle using 2 modes: RNDIS/Ethernet gadget. This shows up as usbx (usb0 in my case) SSH over network using the IP address assigned by the router. This shows up as wlanx (wlan0 in my case) [root@kindle us]# ifconfig lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 ... usb0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr EE:19:00:00:00:00 inet addr:192.168.15.244 Bcast:192.168.15.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 ... wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 08:84:9D:7B:9C:F1 inet addr:192.168.2.71 Bcast:1...