Kindle Jailbreaking

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Sorry if this is a yap fest and somewhat unintelligible! I suppose that's what you get for reading from the Scratchpad tho!

I had this Kindle Touch laying in a box unused for the past months or maybe even year, having moved on to using my tablet for reading, and ultimately not reading at all in recent times. I was thinking, there's gotta be a way to repurpose it, right? The new Kindles run Android.. which was simple, but I wasn't sure about this one.

Black and White image of the backside of a Kindle Touch on a dresser.

Re-enactment

So I did some research and luckily, these 2012 Kindles can be modded. It was the first time I was doing softmodding without a proper guide, being used to *.hacks.guide pages. So I turned to the dark side... AI...

It started off well, providing me with common resources like MobileRead forums.

But the good times stopped there, it already gave me false information, telling me to create folders---essentially hallucinating a way to jailbreak, wasting me an hour or so trying to figure it out.. before I decided enough with AI for now and just do my own research.

After finishing the jailbreak and ssh-ing into my Kindle, I needed to figure out how to make a cronjob for a dashboard. The normal command cronjob -e didn't work, erroring out. So I once again decided to ask AI... just another waste of time.

It wanted me to remove the crontab directory to make my own crontab file in place of it, which I immediately knew was a bad idea and a potential brick waiting to happen. So I gave up on AI again and just used the paths it gave me to figure stuff out. I ended up finding out that cronjobs are just located under /etc/crontab/root and it was fairly simple to edit and add my own.

After a bit of programming and tinkering, I ended up making a dashboard for my server which I feel like ended up quote nice. The Kindle only has about a two day battery now, but, it is better than sitting in a closet at 0% for its entire life.

Black and White image of the backside of a Kindle Touch on a dresser.

Kindle propped under my monitor for a quick view on my server in-case it's gonna blow.

Honestly, I should give this kindle credit, it's surprisingly crisp and legible for being an 600x800 screen. There's plenty of space for server stats and even a small joke at the bottom :p

TBH, there were many videos on how to jailbreak Kindles, but I personally just.. didn't wanna watch any since I really don't like watching videos like that, instead opting for text guides. So here's a text guide if you ever find yourself in a situation like mine!

  1. Download the K5 Jailbreak files from here.
  2. Unzip the contents of kindle-5.4-jailbreak.zip to the root of the device.
  3. Open the Menu on your Kindle and go to Settings, open the Menu again and click "Update Your Kindle".
    • This should result in **** JAILBREAK **** displaying at the bottom.
  4. Get the updated DevCerts from here.
  5. Drag Update_mkk-20250419-k5-ALL_keystore-install.bin onto the root of your device and update your kindle using the same method as before.
  6. Download KUAL from here.
  7. Drag KUAL-KDK-2.0.azw2 into the Kindle's Documents folder.
  8. Download MR Package Installer from here.
  9. Drag extensions and mrpackages into the root of your Kindle.
  10. Download USBNetwork from here.
  11. Copy Update_usbnet_0.22.N_install_touch_pw.bin to the mrpackages folder.
  12. Open KUAL > Helper > then tap "Install MR Packages"
    • Leave it be for a few minutes while it installs.
  13. Re-open KUAL and navigate to Toggle USBNetwork.
  14. From here, attempt to SSH into the Kindle. If the default passwords found here don't work, then try:
    • Connect your Kindle to your PC again through USB. You may need to untoggle USBNetwork for MTP to function.
    • In a terminal, run ssh-keygen -t rsa, you don't need to set a passphrase + store the key in its default location.
    • On your Kindle, create a file named authorized_keys in the usbnet/etc directory.
    • Copy the contents of ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub or C:\Users\{username}\.ssh\id_rsa.pub into authorized_keys
    • Attempt to SSH into your Kindle again and it should log in immediately with no password prompt.
    • Change the root password by running mntroot rw and passwd root.
  15. You are now free to do whatever you want with your Kindle! I found the best way to keep the Kindle awake was to emulate a suspend loop using:
    • lipc-set-prop com.lab126.powerd powerButton 1 && lipc-set-prop com.lab126.powerd powerButton 1
    • This resets the suspend timer more effectively than any other solution I have found. Just run it with a cronjob or within a script.
    • Also a quick note: you may edit cronjobs using nano /etc/crontab/root

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