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Comment by hackernudes | Hacker News Reader

I'm a seasoned embedded engineer and it took me hours to figure what the "right" jailbreak was and how it worked. In the end it was easy to accomplish but as usual the documentation is abysmal.

I sometimes catch myself saying "we" when prompting AI so it really doesn't bother me to see this language being used. But I concede it can sound jarring or hubristic.

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but how?... https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreak-wizard.html it should take you a few minutes, maybe longer if you have to fill the system up with data to prevent updates but "hours" from a embedded engineer?

A little late and I can't remember the full details, but I did go through kindlemodding dot org. I suspect initially I couldn't get WinterBreak2 working on an unregistered kindle. IIRC you have to reboot after setting up wifi to skip the registration and get to the browser, but I didn't realize that at first.

I ended up installing LanguageBreak but it took many attempts and many many reboots of the kindle into demo mode which takes forever. Even now searching how to jailbreak an unregistered kindle Paperwhite of my generation (can't remember off the top of my head) top results point to using LanguageBreak.

Once I got WinterBreak2 installed it was pretty easy. The site mentions a lot of stuff about package managers that seem to not exist at all which was confusing.

Now I'm happily booting straight into KOReader using an init script that I wrote that is gated on the presence of a file in the USB storage area.

I dunno, I'm a kinda-dumb web developer who's spent the past 9 months deep-frying my brain with LLM model output, and it also took me multiple hours (but, less than a day) to figure out the right jailbreak for my kindle and how to run it. I think that's probably just how long it takes to find what you need on the kindle jailbreaking wiki and carefully follow the instructions, regardless of what other skills and preexisting knowledge you may have.

why? https://kindlemodding.org/jailbreak-wizard.html its dead simple there is no way it takes hours

That is, in fact, the page I started on. But the firmware on my paperwhite 2 kindle is so old (and also can't be logged in to my Amazon account) that I couldn't get the provided instructions to work, so I had to go spelunking on the wiki to find an ostensibly obsolete jailbreak that did work for me.

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