Group: Hardware/Computers/e-readers

Rationale

This page aims to document which existing ebook readers could become RYF certified without too much work.

Requirements

Basic requirements

• No WiFi unless the Wifi chip works with free software.
• Free boot software or the ability to easily port one to the e-reader.
  • If the code is signed, the system on a chip should have hardware flaws to enable users to bypass it. Some old I.MX are affected by that.
  • If there is no free software, enough documentation should be available as source code to enable porting an existing bootloader to it.
• Enough RAM to run free software operating systems.

Requirements hardware support work faster =

Since e-readers without WiFi or telephony network connection are old, the software they come with and the corresponding source code is also really old. To be able to use modern GNU/Linux or Android distribution on them, the source code needs to be used to add support for the device in recent hardware support software such as Linux or free software boot software like u-boot. Because of that it's better to pick a device that already has has much hardware supported upstream.

Additional requirements

• More RAM is better: Devices with not enough RAM may not be able to use modern FSDG distributions. Creating a specific distribution for such devices would require someone to maintain it.
• Touchscreen

Issues

• Hardware availability: Older models are not manufactured anymore, and some vendors even went bankrupt.
• Batteries: Batteries might need to be changed. The availability and compatibility of replacements were not researched yet. We need your help to do it.

See also

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-readers