Online / 5 & 6 February 2022

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The road towards using regular linux on ebook readers

Experiences and progress with Kobo/Tolino readers


Most Kobo/Tolino readers offer a well marked console port and often a second UART. If they are not water resistant, they offer an internal µSD card slot containing the whole operating system and bootloader so that sounds like an invitation to do something interesting with them besides just reading books. Especially in prolonged outdoor activities, the display and their low power consumption have their merits. Hardware is quite similar, so you also have chances to get a replacement next corner. Several devicetrees and also some drivers made their way into mainline linux now, on others upstreaming work is in progress. Support is starting to find its way into mobile linux distributions like postmarketOS and graphics start to work with standard APIs. In this talk I talk about my experiences, especially the current state of support in mainline linux, what is missing and what are the challenges. I will also talk about requirements for the graphics userspace and shortly present my favorite use case: displaying maps.

Speakers

Andreas Kemnade

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