Comment by adhesive_wombat
3 years ago
Props for the hacking aspect and reuse of a locked device.
If you just wanted to mess with "an" eink device, a Kobo is much easier since it's already just a Linux device and can easily be accessed without hacks.
On at least some models, you can also swap the SD card and start a whole fresh system, so no matter what you're up to, you can keep your ereader too.
And even easier: koreader ships with SSH, all you have to do is install that for wireless console access without changing the SD card.
You might want to consider Pine64's PineNote, which is being developed as a Linux-ready, hackable device. However, development seems to be in its earliest stages: even booting Linux is a serious challenge, and recovering from softbricks is unusually difficult https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineNote For most people, a Kobo will almost certainly be more straightforward.
The remarkable also can be accessed through ssh, without any hack !
Kindles are Linux devices too, or at least they were through the end of 2017 when I left a team that worked on them. It seems likely they still are. You could SSH into them over USB if you had the root password, and even internally we used public hacker tools to get those passwords. I'm not positive this is the same one, but it looks familiar. https://www.sven.de/kindle/
Right but what I meant is you don't really need any hacks to get into a Kobo, you just plug it in, install SSH and away you go.
Kindles seem quite a bit more adversarial.
Many phones are fundamentally Linux devices too, but can't really be properly accessed without hacks unless the manufacturer allows you to.
Can you access the display for the Kobo? What sort of things can you do with it? I'm tempted to get a Kobo reader next, if it's hackable.
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I have a kindle pw2 and KOReader has breathed new life into it. Highly recommended.