Prerequisites
You will need to be running a Linux operating system* or WSL/msys2 under Windows
*MacOS is untested but may work
You will need a jailbroken Kindle and you will need to know what firmware your Kindle is running on.
You will also need to compile a toolchain targetting your device, the details of which are explained further on this page.
You will also need the following packages installed on your system for the toolchain:
- git
- ncurses
- gperf
- help2man
- bison
- texinfo
- flex
- gawk
- unzip
- wget
As well as curl and sed installed for the SDK
And specifically for this tutorial:
- meson
- gtk2 (with development headers)
- compilation tools
Installing The Required Packages
For Arch Linux
# For the toolchain
sudo pacman -S base-devel curl git gperf help2man unzip wget
# For the SDK
sudo pacman -S curl sed libarchive nettle
# For this tutorial
sudo pacman -S meson gtk2
For Debian/Ubuntu
# For the toolchain
sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake bison flex gawk libtool libtool-bin libncurses-dev curl file git gperf help2man texinfo unzip wget
# For the sdk
sudo apt-get install curl sed libarchive-dev nettle-dev
# For this tutorial
sudo apt-get install meson gtk2.0 libgtk2.0-dev
Building The Toolchain
1. Clone the toolchain
git clone --recursive --depth=1 https://github.com/koreader/koxtoolchain.git
2. Build the toolchain for your device
cd koxtoolchain
chmod +x ./gen-tc.sh
./gen-tc.sh <target>
Where target should be replaced as follows:
| TC | Supported Devices | Target |
|---|---|---|
| kindle | Kindle 2, DX, DXg, 3 | [not supported by this tutorial] |
| kindle5 | Kindle 4, Touch, PW1 | [not supported by this tutorial] |
| kindlepw2 | Kindle PW2 & everything since on FW <5.16.3 | kindlepw2 |
| kindlehf | Any Kindle on FW >= 5.16.3 | kindlehf |
If you want to support multiple Kindles, you can compile multiple toolchain targets just by running ./gen-tc.sh <other_target> and the new toolchain be added to your ~/x-tools directory
Compilation usually takes around 30-minutes per target on most PCs
Setting up the SDK
The KMC Kindle SDK augments your existing koxtoolchain installation by providing headers and library files used with the Kindle.
1. Clone the SDK
git clone --recursive --depth=1 https://github.com/KindleModding/kindle-sdk.git
2. Install the SDK for your target
cd kindle-sdk
chmod +x ./gen-sdk.sh
./gen-sdk.sh <target>
Where <target> is the same as the toolchain you want to install the SDK for.
Once the SDK has finished installing itself, make a note of the path it returns to the meson-crosscompile.txt file, this will be important later!