Full Linux distro on a Nook color

April 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We should have included a footnote in the title. You can say that [Thomas Polasek] installed a full version of Arch Linux on his Nook Color, but there’s one caveat. It’s running on top of the Android kernel and his proof-of-concept uses a second computer to get it up and running. But there’s potential for that to change moving forward.

Unlike previous attempts to run a Linux distro on Android, this does away with using a VNC to show the desktop. [Thomas] is commandeering Android’s frame buffer so that it can be used by the X desktop without needing to set up display drivers. To start off he installed a ROM based on CM7. A couple of Android apps give him the functionality needed to get the Arch Linux distro running from the SD card. This is accomplished by tunneling into the tablet via SSH, and using the ‘chroot’ command to make it active. The hope is that this can somehow be automated by a script.

A female to female USB coupler was used to connect the keyboard and mouse to the Nook. It looks like LXDE would be useless without them; touch control is not yet implemented. Those shortcomings aside, everything seems to be running pretty fast in the video after the break.

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Using the nook as a keyboard

March 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Andrew] has been pining for an Optimus Maximus – a keyboard with a small LCD screen in each key – for years. Like a lot of people, he love the idea of a completely configurable keyboard, but balked at the two thousand dollar price tag. Although it doesn’t have full color OLED screens behind each key, [Andrew]’s nook simple touch can be used as a keyboard just the same.

After rooting his new nook, [Andrew] had a very nice tablet computer, and the only Android device with an e-ink screen. Although[Andrew] never wrote an Android app before, he wanted to do a proof of concept build to see if a nook keyboard would actually work. The “keyboard app” is actually just a webpage hosted on his home server. When he presses a virtual key, JavaScript sends an ASCII value back to the server where it is decoded and sent to xte.

[Andrew] says his build works, but not very well. Opera mini doesn’t like the homebrew server he set up, and Cyrillic characters are a no go. Still, it works, and looks like an awesome application for an e-ink tablet with a proper Android app. Demo after the break.

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