Finally after a lot of endless nights tingering around I decided to post about my newly acquired Amazon Kindle 3. Since I study  presentations and books from PDF files I thought a device like this would be really useful, and after reading somewhere that it could run Ubuntu Linux and even with X11 I knew exactly what I needed. Without wasting time I went to the local electronics store to check their prices. To my surprise they offered the previous generation for 350 euros (really wtf?) when you could order the latest version from Amazon for barely 120 euros with DHL shipping.

Day one, I literally took it apart, jailbroken, changed the boring wallpapers to something more cool and installed SSH. But it wasn’t enough.. Although it runs natively on some basic Linux install, it is very limiting. After studying some guides and forums I was up and running!

Here are the steps I followed to installed a Debian chroot on my Kindle device and some network tools.

NOTE: This is not an expert how to guide, just what I did to make it work, so it is not the best or most safe way to do it, I can’t have any responsibility if you brick your device. Please if you want to follow the steps make sure you know what you are doing.

First we have to create a file system image, the following commands create a 512MB ext3 image and mounts it on /mnt. To make it larger just change the count parameter.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/wheezy.ext3 bs=1M count=512
mkfs.ext3 /tmp/wheezy.ext3
tune2fs -i 0 -c 0 /tmp/wheezy.ext3
sudo mount -o loop -t ext3 /tmp/wheezy.ext3 /mnt/

Now we have to install and configure multistrap, its a debootstrap like utility that installs a Debian base system plus you can specify extra repositories and packets to install in the configuration file.

sudo apt-get install multistrap
nano wheezy-config

Here is a simple configuration I used, more can be found at the previous links.

[General]
unpack=true
arch=armel
directory=/mnt/
debootstrap=Grip Updates
aptsources=Debian Grip Updates

[Grip]
packages=ntpdate udev lrzsz netcat telnetd apt
source=http://www.emdebian.org/grip
keyring=emdebian-archive-keyring
suite=wheezy

[Updates]
packages=apt
source=http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian
keyring=debian-archive-keyring
suite=wheezy-proposed-updates

[Debian]
packages=
source=http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian
keyring=debian-archive-keyring
suite=wheezy

Next step is to finally install the chroot on our image, this should take a while.

sudo multistrap -f wheezy-config

After everything is done, unmount the image and copy it to your Kindle. Now you are ready to mount it on your Kindle and chroot into it. To make things easier here is a script by Xkid you could use.

#!/bin/sh
echo "[*] Mounting Rootfs..."
mount -o loop,noatime -t ext3 /mnt/us/debian.ext3 /mnt/debian
echo "[*] Preparing Filesystem..."
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/debian/dev
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/debian/proc
mount -o bind /sys /mnt/debian/sys
echo "[*] Preparing Network Connections..."
cp /etc/hosts /mnt/debian/etc/hosts
cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/debian/etc/resolv.conf
echo "[*] Starting Shell..."
chroot /mnt/debian /bin/bash
echo "[*]Unmounting Rootfs..."
umount /mnt/debian/dev
umount /mnt/debian/proc
umount /mnt/debian/sys
umount /mnt/debian

After you have sucessfully chrooted into your image, you have to configure dpkg by running

dpkg --configure -a

By this stage you should have a working apt-get, from there you can install pretty much anything else you want. Here are some packets you might find interesting.

net-tools – A collection of network programs like ifconfig, arp, route etc
netcat – Networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections
gcc, g++ – GNU C/C++ compilers
links – Terminal web browser
nano – Text editor

Plus I compiled a lot of custom networking tools from source. Also I tried nmap and aircrack-ng though with little success so far.

Have fun.

 

PS: Use Luigis terminal or Full Screen Terminal to mount and run Debian from within your kindle.

 

PS: For more information check out these links:

http://wiki.debian.org/Multistrap

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=96048

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=133005

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=125860

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88004