4 ms·

Some Kobo e-readers can now run Linux, becoming inexpensive e-ink tablets

65 points by cunidev 5y ago

m-p-3 5y ago
Fingers crossed to see the Kobo Glo HD getting PostmarketOS.
esperent 5y ago
Given the atrocious refresh rate of these panels which makes typing/drawing/web browsing unpleasant, what are the use cases for this (besides reading documents)? The only things I can think of are potentially better PDF viewing, and simple games like chess or solitaire (I think Koreader already has those however). Seems like a lot of effort to go to for little benefit.
- m-p-3 5y ago
  To be honest, I'd really like the ability to read my email, see my day planner and read my RSS feed on one of those.
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    You can get eInk Android tablets. Easier to use for stuff like that.
    - m-p-3 5y ago
      I figured I'd do it that way since I already have the device and minimize e-waste.
- fish45 5y ago
  drawing on my kobo using the Plato sketch program is actually super responsive. I'm not sure why but it seems that the refresh rate is fine and e.g. flipping a page or scrolling takes a long time for other reasons than the refresh rate
  - Doxin 5y ago
    When drawing it can do very small partial refreshes. Sometimes E-ink screens also have a fast refresh mode and a high quality refresh mode. Doing the fast refresh ends up with ghosting since it doesn't give the pigment particles enough time to move. Using it for some things is fine, but only if you later also do the proper refresh. In practice you'll see full screen refreshes be the high quality type, and smaller refreshes being of the fast type. That said plenty of e-ink displays don't bother with the fast refresh or even with partial refreshes and just always do a full screen high quality refresh. For E-books that's probably fine.
- cunidev 5y ago
  I personally would use this as a second screen for viewing documentation and similar static things. Also 6" is a bit small for this, but also LaTeX previews would be handy.
- CodeGlitch 5y ago
  Could run as a server of some kind, with the screen displaying the server's status? Would be cool to have charts and graphs.
- solarkraft 5y ago
  > Given the atrocious refresh rate of these panels which makes typing/drawing/web browsing unpleasant For you, I guess? Lots of people are just fine with it, including myself, especially against the background of the great reading quality.
- SamuelAdams 5y ago
  Could also download books from non-approved stores or websites with a full web browser. There is an “experimental” we browser in the kobo software but it is not the same as chrome / Firefox.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    This is already possible on numerous e-readers. I can vouch for Onyx BOOX specifically.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  I don't know about Kobo devices, but there are ebook readers with multiple display modes, several of which work well for console / terminal use, and might even be usable for some GUI applications, with suitable tweaks. Text-based use is actually excellent. The general principles of eink UI/UX design that I've been formulating are: - Persistence is free. If the display doesn't need to change, it draws no power, and will display the last-painted content indefinitely. - Pixels are cheap. The pixel density is high, typically 200--300 dpi. This is better than all but the best Retina displays at the low end, and parallels paper at the high end. - Ambient-light and bright-lit environment performance is excellent, most especially direct sunlight. Frontlight or backlight systems make low-light performance better. Principle mode is reflective rather than emissive display. Shading and pigmentation is subtractive rather than additive. - Paints are expensive. They draw power, are typically far slower than emissive displays (1-8 Hz rather than 60--200+ Hz), and result in significant degredation (ghosting) at higher modes. Repainting the screen is highly distracting. - Contrast is limited. Modern displays are typically 16-shade greyscale. Line art and high-contrast block regions display well. Halftoned images appear better than direct rendering. Shading and any deviation from pure-black-on-pure-white contrasts degrades performance. - Colour is nonexistent in most cases, and limited where present. There are colour e-ink displays, though these tend to be muted and pastel, best suited to comic books rather than high-saturation photorealistic presentation. - Paginated navigation is highly preferred to scrolling. Pagination is predictable and executes a single repaint for a navigation action. Scrolling at high-quality display levels creates noise and takes time, at lower-quality display levels remains difficult to track accurately and creates a large level of artifacts on display. - Dark-on-light is preferred to light-on-dark, generally. Night-mode themes typically don't render well.
  - kristianp 5y ago
    Paints do appear to be really slow on my 8 year old kobo glo, but it still works. Is there a terminal mode that just wraps the last line back to the top of the screen instead of scrolling the whole screen when it reaches the bottom?
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
solarkraft 5y ago
That's pretty exciting. It has been possible to run Debian on Kindles via Chroot [0] for a while, but those things run decade-old kernels at this point, making many things impossible. Getting a current kernel and fully free system is super cool! On that note: The Linux system Kindles run is pretty cool: It uses X, dbus, Awesome (window manager), Upstart and contains a lot of not only not obfuscated, but commented javascript and shell scripts. It's fun to dig around and will even run simple Linux tools like Rclone and Syncthing, making it a breeze to integrate into your existing systems (for instance I used to listen on the outOfScreenSaver dbus event to run an update script) [1]! The main issue I encountered is that my Kindle Touch doesn't support TLS 1.3, but the relevant library should be updateable. If you are interested in modifying these cool devices, have a look at the MobileRead forums [2], a vibrant little community around that exact topic (mostly focusing on Kobo/Tolino and Kindle). [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHoPgXb-JNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHoPgXb-JNM [1]: https://gist.github.com/solarkraft/fa1bee41f970eb3a3da23d7216e364e7 https://gist.github.com/solarkraft/fa1bee41f970eb3a3da23d721... [2]: https://www.mobileread.com/ https://www.mobileread.com/
- alex7o 5y ago
  Sadly the newer kindles are hard to jailbreak + root and the newest ones run android (the Amazon kind).

65 points by cunidev 5y ago

Fingers crossed to see the Kobo Glo HD getting PostmarketOS.

Given the atrocious refresh rate of these panels which makes typing/drawing/web browsing unpleasant, what are the use cases for this (besides reading documents)? The only things I can think of are potentially better PDF viewing, and simple games like chess or solitaire (I think Koreader already has those however). Seems like a lot of effort to go to for little benefit.

m-p-3 5y ago
To be honest, I'd really like the ability to read my email, see my day planner and read my RSS feed on one of those.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  You can get eInk Android tablets. Easier to use for stuff like that.
  - m-p-3 5y ago
    I figured I'd do it that way since I already have the device and minimize e-waste.
fish45 5y ago
drawing on my kobo using the Plato sketch program is actually super responsive. I'm not sure why but it seems that the refresh rate is fine and e.g. flipping a page or scrolling takes a long time for other reasons than the refresh rate
- Doxin 5y ago
  When drawing it can do very small partial refreshes. Sometimes E-ink screens also have a fast refresh mode and a high quality refresh mode. Doing the fast refresh ends up with ghosting since it doesn't give the pigment particles enough time to move. Using it for some things is fine, but only if you later also do the proper refresh. In practice you'll see full screen refreshes be the high quality type, and smaller refreshes being of the fast type. That said plenty of e-ink displays don't bother with the fast refresh or even with partial refreshes and just always do a full screen high quality refresh. For E-books that's probably fine.
cunidev 5y ago
I personally would use this as a second screen for viewing documentation and similar static things. Also 6" is a bit small for this, but also LaTeX previews would be handy.
CodeGlitch 5y ago
Could run as a server of some kind, with the screen displaying the server's status? Would be cool to have charts and graphs.
solarkraft 5y ago
> Given the atrocious refresh rate of these panels which makes typing/drawing/web browsing unpleasant For you, I guess? Lots of people are just fine with it, including myself, especially against the background of the great reading quality.
SamuelAdams 5y ago
Could also download books from non-approved stores or websites with a full web browser. There is an “experimental” we browser in the kobo software but it is not the same as chrome / Firefox.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  This is already possible on numerous e-readers. I can vouch for Onyx BOOX specifically.
dredmorbius 5y ago
I don't know about Kobo devices, but there are ebook readers with multiple display modes, several of which work well for console / terminal use, and might even be usable for some GUI applications, with suitable tweaks. Text-based use is actually excellent. The general principles of eink UI/UX design that I've been formulating are: - Persistence is free. If the display doesn't need to change, it draws no power, and will display the last-painted content indefinitely. - Pixels are cheap. The pixel density is high, typically 200--300 dpi. This is better than all but the best Retina displays at the low end, and parallels paper at the high end. - Ambient-light and bright-lit environment performance is excellent, most especially direct sunlight. Frontlight or backlight systems make low-light performance better. Principle mode is reflective rather than emissive display. Shading and pigmentation is subtractive rather than additive. - Paints are expensive. They draw power, are typically far slower than emissive displays (1-8 Hz rather than 60--200+ Hz), and result in significant degredation (ghosting) at higher modes. Repainting the screen is highly distracting. - Contrast is limited. Modern displays are typically 16-shade greyscale. Line art and high-contrast block regions display well. Halftoned images appear better than direct rendering. Shading and any deviation from pure-black-on-pure-white contrasts degrades performance. - Colour is nonexistent in most cases, and limited where present. There are colour e-ink displays, though these tend to be muted and pastel, best suited to comic books rather than high-saturation photorealistic presentation. - Paginated navigation is highly preferred to scrolling. Pagination is predictable and executes a single repaint for a navigation action. Scrolling at high-quality display levels creates noise and takes time, at lower-quality display levels remains difficult to track accurately and creates a large level of artifacts on display. - Dark-on-light is preferred to light-on-dark, generally. Night-mode themes typically don't render well.
- kristianp 5y ago
  Paints do appear to be really slow on my 8 year old kobo glo, but it still works. Is there a terminal mode that just wraps the last line back to the top of the screen instead of scrolling the whole screen when it reaches the bottom?
  - dredmorbius 5y ago

solarkraft 5y ago

That's pretty exciting. It has been possible to run Debian on Kindles via Chroot [0] for a while, but those things run decade-old kernels at this point, making many things impossible. Getting a current kernel and fully free system is super cool! On that note: The Linux system Kindles run is pretty cool: It uses X, dbus, Awesome (window manager), Upstart and contains a lot of not only not obfuscated, but commented javascript and shell scripts. It's fun to dig around and will even run simple Linux tools like Rclone and Syncthing, making it a breeze to integrate into your existing systems (for instance I used to listen on the outOfScreenSaver dbus event to run an update script) [1]! The main issue I encountered is that my Kindle Touch doesn't support TLS 1.3, but the relevant library should be updateable. If you are interested in modifying these cool devices, have a look at the MobileRead forums [2], a vibrant little community around that exact topic (mostly focusing on Kobo/Tolino and Kindle). [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHoPgXb-JNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHoPgXb-JNM [1]: https://gist.github.com/solarkraft/fa1bee41f970eb3a3da23d7216e364e7 https://gist.github.com/solarkraft/fa1bee41f970eb3a3da23d721... [2]: https://www.mobileread.com/ https://www.mobileread.com/

alex7o 5y ago
Sadly the newer kindles are hard to jailbreak + root and the newest ones run android (the Amazon kind).