Using a prebuilt SDK

The rest of the tutorial will show you how to manually set up the koxtoolchain + kindle-sdk combination. However, I’m already building pre-packaged SDKs that just need extracting and are ready for use afterwards.

You can find these under the kindle-sdk releases. Always take the latest one, as it will include the latest libraries. These are a device + specific firmware version, like scribe1-5.17.3.tar.gz, or kindlepw5-5.16.2.1.1.tar.gz. This doesn’t mean they’ll only work for a specific device and/or firmware, but some devices and/or firmwares will have different libraries, or different versions from libraries.

If you are not tightly integrating against Kindle internal libraries, the included kindlepw5-5.16.2.1.1.tar.gz will work for SF (Soft-Float) Kindles, while scribe1-5.17.3.tar.gz will work for HF (Hard-Float) Kindles.

# Downloading the latest HF pre-build SDK:
wget https://github.com/Sighery/kindle-sdk/releases/latest/download/scribe1-5.17.3.tar.gz
# Unpacking to any arbitrary directory:
mkdir ~/kindle-toolchains/
tar -xzf scribe1-5.17.3.tar.gz -C ~/kindle-toolchain/

If you use one of the pre-built SDKs, you can skip to the next section, Setting Up The Project.

Prerequisites

You will need to be running a Linux operating system* or WSL/msys2 under Windows
*MacOS is untested but may work

You will need a jailbroken Kindle and you will need to know what firmware your Kindle is running on.

You will also need to compile a toolchain targetting your device, the details of which are explained further on this page.

You will also need the following packages installed on your system for the toolchain:

• git
• ncurses
• gperf
• help2man
• bison
• texinfo
• flex
• gawk
• unzip
• wget

As well as curl and sed installed for the SDK

And specifically for this tutorial:

• meson
• gtk2 (with development headers)
• compilation tools

Installing The Required Packages

For Arch Linux

# For the toolchain
sudo pacman -S base-devel curl git gperf help2man unzip wget

# For the SDK
sudo pacman -S curl sed libarchive nettle

# For this tutorial
sudo pacman -S meson gtk2

For Debian/Ubuntu

# For the toolchain
sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake bison flex gawk libtool libtool-bin libncurses-dev curl file git gperf help2man texinfo unzip wget

# For the sdk
sudo apt-get install curl sed libarchive-dev nettle-dev

# For this tutorial
sudo apt-get install meson gtk2.0 libgtk2.0-dev

Building The Toolchain

If you don’t want to build the toolchain yourself or if you encounter difficulties in building it, use the pre-built release

1. Clone the toolchain

git clone --recursive --depth=1 https://github.com/koreader/koxtoolchain.git

2. Build the toolchain for your device

cd koxtoolchain
chmod +x ./gen-tc.sh
./gen-tc.sh <target>

Where target should be replaced as follows:

If you want to support multiple Kindles, you can compile multiple toolchain targets just by running ./gen-tc.sh <other_target> and the new toolchain be added to your ~/x-tools directory

Compilation usually takes around 30-minutes per target on most PCs

Setting up the SDK

The KMC Kindle SDK augments your existing koxtoolchain installation by providing headers and library files used with the Kindle.

1. Clone the SDK

git clone --recursive --depth=1 https://github.com/Sighery/kindle-sdk.git

2. Install the SDK for your target

cd kindle-sdk
chmod +x ./gen-sdk.sh
./gen-sdk.sh <target>

Where <target> is the same as the toolchain you want to install the SDK for.

Once the SDK has finished installing itself, make a note of the path it returns to the meson-crosscompile.txt file, this will be important later!