[conspire] Elise's laptop

[Rick Moen]

[I hope you won't mind my CC'ing our discussion mailing list.]

Quoting Elise Scher (elise.scher01 at gmail.com):

>      Is the next meeting of CABAL at your house in Menlo Park next Saturday
> at 4:00 pm? I would like to come and bring two slow tablets and a Kindle
> Paperwhite. I just bought a Kindle Fire as a potential replacement for the
> Fire. I noticed a tablet at the last meeting.
>      And thanks to you and Daniel and the others for installing versions of
> Linux on two of my old laptops and installing the donut tire on my car! The
> car is better now. I will tell you what I had to do when I see you.

Hi, Elise!  It's lucky I saw this e-mail.  Because you wrote it as a
reply to an old e-mail, it was several pages down in my main mailbox (on
account of message threading), hence I almost didn't see it at all.

Because Deirdre and I will be spending Thursday through Sunday south of
Lake Tahoe, the normal 2nd Saturday CABAL meeting has been rescheduled
to the following (3rd) Saturday, October 21st.  I've already updated the
Web schedule (http://linuxmafia.com/cabal/, http://linuxmafia.com/cabal/), 
but haven't yet sent out an announcement to CABAL's discussion mailing
list (http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire).  I'll be doing
that today.

You've quite possibly already done research about other-OS prospects for
your two slow tablets and Kindle Paperwhite.  I don't (yet) know much
about this, but can strongly urge Web-searching using the specific
hardware model plus 'Linux' or other creative combinations like
'rooting'.  

I mention 'rooting' because, as a broad generalisation,  it is often
necessary to exploit software flaws that have been found in the device's
preloaded software to gain full root-user control of the device that the
manufacturer would rather you not have, and deal with other obstacles
place in your way such as 'locked' firmware.

Beware of being mislead by marketing names for products such as 'Kindle
Paperwhite', which is best understood as a _series_ of models, but
determining their other-OS prospects depends quite a bit on the specific
model.  How to deal with one is often quite different from how to deal
with earlier or later models in the same series.

As always, information on the Internet is date-sensitive, e.g., this
article starts out with the claim 'Last week we learned you can
jailbreak every current model of Kindle', but you'll note the datestamp
of July 20, 2016.
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-jailbreak-your-kindle-1783864074
Is that still true of _every_ current model of Kindle?  Maybe, maybe not.