chroot shenanigans 2: Running a full desktop environment on an Amazon Kindle
In my previous post, I described running Arch on an OpenWRT router. Today, I'll be taking it a step further and running Arch and a full LXDE installation natively on an Amazon Kindle, which can be interacted with directly using the touch screen. This is possible thanks to the Kindle's operating system being Linux!
You can see the end result in action here. Apologies for the shaky video - it was shot using my phone and no tripod.
If you're wanting to follow along, make sure you've rooted your Kindle beforehand. This is essential – without it, it's impossible to run custom scripts or binaries.
I'm testing this on an 8th generation Kindle (KT3) – it should, however, work for all recent Kindles given you've enough storage and are rooted. You also need to set up USBnetwork for SSH access and optionally KUAL if you want a simple way of launching the chroot.
First things first: We need to set up a filesystem and extract an Arch installation into it, which we can later chroot into. The filesystem will be a file which will be mounted as a loop device. The reason why we're not extracting the Arch installation directly into a directory on the Kindle is because the Kindle's storage filesystem is FAT32. FAT32 doesn't support required features such as symbolic links, which would break the Arch installation. Please note that this also means that your chroot filesystem can be 4 gigabytes large, at maximum. This can be worked around by mounting the real root inside the chroot filesystem, which it's still a hacky way to go about it. But I digress.
First, figure out how large your filesystem actually can be. SSH into your Kindle and see how much free space you have:
$ ssh root@192.168.15.244
kindle# df -k /mnt/base-us
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/loop/0 3188640 361856 2826784 11% /mnt/base-us
Seems like we have around 2800000K (around 2.8G) of space available. Let's make our filesystem 2.6G – it's enough to host our root filesystem and some extra applications, such as LXDE. Note that I'll be running the following commands on my PC and transferring the filesystem over later. You can also do all of this on the Kindle, but it's simply easier and faster this way.
Let's create a blank file of the wanted size. I'm using dd, but you can also use fallocate for this:
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=arch.img bs=1024 count=2600000
2600000+0 records in
2600000+0 records out
2662400000 bytes (2.7 GB, 2.5 GiB) copied, 6.92058 s, 385 MB/s
Let's create our filesystem on it. Since we're doing this on the PC, we need make it 32bit and disable the metadata_csum and huge_file options on the filesystem, as the Kindle's ext4 kernel doesn't support them.
$ mkfs.ext4 -O ^64bit,^metadata_csum,^huge_file arch.img
mke2fs 1.45.0 (6-Mar-2019)
Discarding device blocks: done
Creating filesystem with 650000 4k blocks and 162560 inodes
Filesystem UUID: a4e72620-368a-44b4-81bb-9e66b2903523
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912
Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (16384 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done
This is optional, but I'll also disable periodic filesystem checks on it:
$ tune2fs -c 0 -i 0 arch.img
tune2fs 1.45.0 (6-Mar-2019)
Setting maximal mount count to -1
Setting interval between checks to 0 seconds
Next it's time to mount the filesystem:
$ mkdir rootfs
$ sudo mount -o loop arch.img rootfs/
The Kindle I'm using has a Cortex-A9-based processor, so let's download the ARMv7 version of Arch Linux ARM from here. You can download it and extract then, or simply download and extract at the same time:
$ curl -L http://os.archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-armv7-latest.tar.gz | sudo tar xz -C rootfs/
sudo is required to extract as it sets up a lot of files with root permissions. You can ignore the errors about SCHILY.fflags. Verify that the files extracted successfully with ls -l rootfs/.
Let's prepare our Kindle for the filesystem. I opted for hosting the filesystem in extensions/karch as I want to use KUAL for easy launching:
$ ssh root@192.168.15.244
kindle# mkdir -p /mnt/base-us/extensions/karch
While we're here, it's also a good idea to stop the power daemon to prevent the Kindle from going into sleep mode while transferring the filesystem and interrupting our transfer:
kindle# stop powerd
powerd stop/waiting
Let's transfer our filesystem:
kindle# exit
Connection to 192.168.15.244 closed.
$ scp arch.img root@192.168.15.244:/mnt/base-us/extensions/karch/
This might take quite a bit of time, depending on your connection.
Once it's done, let's SSH in once again and set up our mountpoint:
$ ssh root@192.168.15.244
kindle# cd /mnt/base-us/extensions/karch/
kindle# mkdir system
I decided to set up my own loop device, so I can have it named, but you can ignore this and opt to use /dev/loop/12 or similar instead. Just make sure it's already not in use with mount.
Setting up a loop point and mounting the filesystem:
kindle# mknod -m0660 /dev/loop/karch b 7 250
kindle# mount -o loop=/dev/loop/karch -t ext4 arch.img system/
We should also mount some system directories into it:
kindle# mount -o bind /dev system/dev
kindle# mount -o bind /dev/pts system/dev/pts
kindle# mount -o bind /proc system/proc
kindle# mount -o bind /sys system/sys
kindle# mount -o bind /tmp system/tmp
kindle# cp /etc/hosts system/etc/
It's time to chroot into our new system and set it up for LXDE. You can also use this opportunity to set up whatever applications you need, such as an onscreen keyboard:
kindle# chroot system/ /bin/bash
chroot# echo 'en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8' > /etc/locale.gen
chroot# locale-gen
chroot# rm /etc/resolv.conf
chroot# echo 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' > /etc/resolv.conf
chroot# pacman-key --init # this will take a while
chroot# pacman-key --populate
chroot# pacman -Syu --noconfirm
chroot# pacman -S lxde xorg-server-xephyr --noconfirm
We use Xephyr because it's the easiest way to get our LXDE session up and running. Since the Kindle uses X11 natively, we can try using that. It's possible to stop the native window manager using stop lab126_gui outside the chroot, but then the Kindle will stop updating the screen with new data, leaving it blank – forcing you to use something like eips to refresh the screen. The X server still works, however, and you can confirm this by using something like x11vnc after running your own WM in it. Xephyr spawns a new X server inside the preexisting X server, which is not as efficient but a lot easier.
We can however stop everything else related to the native GUI, as we need the extra memory and we can't use it while LXDE is running anyways:
chroot# exit
kindle# SERVICES="framework pillow webreader kb contentpackd"
kindle# for service in ${SERVICES}; do stop ${service}; done
While we're here, we need to get the screen size for later:
kindle# eips -i | grep 'xres:' | awk '{print $2"x"$4}'
600x800
Let's chroot back into the system and see if we can get LXDE to run. Be sure to replace the screen size parameter if needed:
kindle# chroot system/ /bin/bash
chroot# export DISPLAY=:0
chroot# Xephyr :1 -title "L:A_N:application_ID:xephyr" -screen 600x800 -cc 4 -nocursor &
chroot# export DISPLAY=:1
chroot# lxsession &
chroot# xrandr -o right
If everything goes well, you should have LXDE visible on your Kindle's screen. Ta-da! Feel free to play around with it. I've found that the touch screen is suprisingly accurate, even though it is using an IR LED system to detect touches instead of a normal digitizer.
Once done in the chroot, Ctrl-C + Ctrl-D can be issued to exit the chroot. We can then restore the Kindle UI by doing:
kindle# for service in ${SERVICES}; do start ${service}; done
It might take a while for anything to display again.
I've mentioned setting up a KUAL extension to automate the entering and exiting of the chroot. You can find that here. If you're interested in using this, make sure you've set up your filesystem first and copied it over to the same directory as the extension, and that it's named arch.img. Everything else is not mandatory - the extension will do it for you.