-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to sotiris.papatheodorou.xyz:1965...
-- Connected
-- Sending request
-- Meta line: 20 text/gemini
Kindleto is a Gemini proxy for the Amazon Kindle 3 and 4. It allows visiting Gemini through the Kindle's own browser. Kindleto is based on the Gneto proxy by Paul Gorman.
Kindlets are Java applets for the Kindle created using the Kindle Development Kit (KDK). The KDK restricts what a Kindlet is allowed to do. The biggest barrier in creating a Gemini client as a Kindlet is that they are only allowed to make HTTP and HTTPS requests, anything else is blocked by the KDK. Moreover the TLS version is too old since those devices were produced around 2010. Since some kind of proxy would be needed to make Gemini requests, might as well reuse the Kindle's own web browser and avoid having to write a GUI. This has the added benefit that HTTP URLs can be directly followed from Gemini pages.
The main reason is that Gneto was already there and it was doing most of the things I needed. I just had to get it to run on the Kindle. Luckily, the fact that Gneto is written in Go made this as simple as
env GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm go build
The mobileread forums and wiki have been the biggest help in getting kindleto running on a Kindle.
I found a very helpful comment somewhere on the mobileread forum explaining that the Kingle init scripts are just SysVinit scripts. The runlevels are:
0 - shutdown
3 - update
5 - boot
6 - reboot
-- Response ended
-- Page fetched on Mon May 20 22:11:51 2024