I've been working recently on making the new Amazon Kindle Fire do everything that Amazon doesn't want it to do. Among other things, after a few days of tinkering and hacking away on the Android Developer Bridge (ADB) I now have a fully rooted Kindle Fire. In addition I've also been working to get all of the Google Android apps working and here is the progress so far.
1. Rooted the Kindle Fire using the well publicized "SuperOneClick" method.
2. Loaded the Google account manager (required step for the applications to follow).
3. Loaded Gmail, Google+, Android Market and several other applications.
At this point with those three steps I've managed to convert what was intended to be a simple ebook reader into a fully featured Android tablet (now we just need an Android 4 rom). If you have a Kindle Fire and wish to do the same as I've done to yours head over to xda-developers.com and take a peek at kindle forums.
Speaking of Android 4, ICS, I have started playing around with compiling my own Android 4.0 ROM. So far I've not made a lot of progress but I'll definitely update in a post here once I've successfully booted my first ROM.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Saturday, November 19, 2011
The Eee is dead and a mini MAME system is born
I must apologize to those of you who follow me. I've been absent recently and I would like to take a moment and try to explain why.
For those of you who know where I work, I don't need to explain too much, you know it's been a busy month at the office. In addition, as the title of the post states, my brand new laptop has sadly processed it's last bit, at least for now. For those who don't know, the laptop took a tumble last month while I was getting into my car on my way into the office. I was in the middle of writing a review on the performance of Ubuntu 11.10 on the Eee 1215B when this occurred. After the fateful tumble the touchpad frequently malfunctioned, requiring me to shutdown and pull the battery out to reset it. I tried for several days to repair it and call Asus about acquiring a replacement wrist rest. I was unsuccessful in my repair attempts and was told my Asus technical support that a replacement was not available. This effectively brought a halt to my review and the search for a replacement test machine is still ongoing. As unfortunate as this was I do not believe this will be the EOL for this machine.
I was fortunate enough to attend SkyDogCon earlier this month. At the conference I began talking with one of the members of Unallocated space, a hacker space in Maryland, who had brought with him a device called a "MAME box". For those who are unfamiliar with MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator), it is a cross-platform application designed to play classic arcade and video games. A few days later I came across the Nanocade and decided that I could give the Eee new life as a desktop arcade machine. If you go to my Google+ page you can check out the first prototype design I made in Sketchup for the housing. The system is undoubtedly going to run some incarnation of Linux, likely Debian or Arch. Subscribe to the blog to stay up to date on my progress as I move forward with the project.
For those of you who know where I work, I don't need to explain too much, you know it's been a busy month at the office. In addition, as the title of the post states, my brand new laptop has sadly processed it's last bit, at least for now. For those who don't know, the laptop took a tumble last month while I was getting into my car on my way into the office. I was in the middle of writing a review on the performance of Ubuntu 11.10 on the Eee 1215B when this occurred. After the fateful tumble the touchpad frequently malfunctioned, requiring me to shutdown and pull the battery out to reset it. I tried for several days to repair it and call Asus about acquiring a replacement wrist rest. I was unsuccessful in my repair attempts and was told my Asus technical support that a replacement was not available. This effectively brought a halt to my review and the search for a replacement test machine is still ongoing. As unfortunate as this was I do not believe this will be the EOL for this machine.
I was fortunate enough to attend SkyDogCon earlier this month. At the conference I began talking with one of the members of Unallocated space, a hacker space in Maryland, who had brought with him a device called a "MAME box". For those who are unfamiliar with MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator), it is a cross-platform application designed to play classic arcade and video games. A few days later I came across the Nanocade and decided that I could give the Eee new life as a desktop arcade machine. If you go to my Google+ page you can check out the first prototype design I made in Sketchup for the housing. The system is undoubtedly going to run some incarnation of Linux, likely Debian or Arch. Subscribe to the blog to stay up to date on my progress as I move forward with the project.
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