I'm not savvy enough to attend O'Reilly Media's annual hacker event, Foo Camp, but I'm geeky enough to appreciate some of what goes on there. And while I understand the terms used in the quote under this snap, the process is nothing I could pull off. So thanks for being a geek and sharing the spoils, Jesse Vincent - an Amazon Kindle running Ubuntu Linux 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope. (cont.)

I'm pulling the hacker's description straight from BoingBoing to avoid confusion. I hope it doesn't have the opposite effect.

"What you see there is a Kindle 2 with the Ubuntu 9.04 port to ARM running in a chrooted environment. On the screen you see xdaliclock in front of an xterm with the remains of a "top" command and a few mildly embarrassing typos.

To open up the Kindle, I used the USB networking debug mode Amazon left hanging around when they first shipped the Kindle 2, a statically linked telnetd and a cross-compiler to bootstrap myself. From there, I built a daemon that can convert DRM-free PDFs and ePubs into something Amazon's reader on the Kindle can deal with. After that, I started to get curious about what else might be possible. It only took a few evenings to get a moderately usable Ubuntu environment running.

Mostly, the Kindle is a lovely little Linux box. Getting X working took a bit of hacking, but everything else 'just works' with very little configuration."

The result is not necessarily the most productive of rigs, but hey, it's fun stuff.