Five years ago, I bought a Supernote A5. It was (and mostly still is) a great device for reading and writing on an eInk display, and it runs plain old linux.

The deciding reason I went for this device instead of the competition is that I was “under the impression” that they were about to enable full SSH access to the device! Awesome!

“Why were you under that impression?”, I hear the skeptics ask. Well, their spokesperson has stated that they would do so. Via mail, and on reddit, publicly, multiple times. I was still torn, so sent them a DM, asking if this was ineed factual. “Yes”, they said, “the next quarterly update will enable SSH access!”.

Great!

Well, it’s been 5 years. They did not follow through. A couple updates were published, none contained the promised functionality, the spokesperson stopped answering questions about SSH. The last software update I received is from 2.5yrs ago. Mentions of the original Supernote A5 have largely been scrubbed from their website.

Let me be clear, the device still functions perfectly. But it is in danger of becoming e-waste because it is so needlessly complicated to get stuff on the device. I’m currently in need of an ebook reader with (ideally) OPDS capability, and I am pretty confident I’d be able to get something like koreader running on this, or at least just run a script to sync files over SSH. Also, I frankly feel wounded in my pride having a Linux device in my possession which refuses to do my bidding (I’m joking of course, but also I am 100% serious).

Here’s all I know:

  • plugging it in via USB, the device reads as an MTP device, with access only to the documents/books/… stored on it
  • you can place an update.zip file (obtained from the SN website) into the root of that MTP directory, and upon reboot, the device will update. To me, this appears to be the most promising route of gaining access.
  • unfortunately, the zip file is encrypted. The decryption key clearly has to be known to the device, but since I have no access to it,…

I’m a software engineer, but I have zero knowledge of the “dark arts”, so to speak. If anyone could help me (or point me into the right direction!), I would really be grateful. I don’t want this (generally nice) product to turn into a paperweight instead of a paper replacement :(

  • @MTK@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    Check out the file update.zip > system.zip > zImage

    It’s the image for the device probably, check this guide out

    https://jamchamb.net/2022/01/02/modify-vmlinuz-arm.html

    You can probably get some sort of boot script implanted in there, or even just load the image in a vm, modify it, and recreate it.

    You might also need to modify the install script there since it seems to check if the update already exists and it might not run thinking you are up to date.

    • @smiletolerantly@awful.systemsOP
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      22 hours ago

      Fantastic.

      Since the zip also includes a bunch of shell scripts, I think it’s possible I could also just install ssh directly - but the image will certainly make experimenting in a VM the safer option until something works out… ^^

      Oh man, I can’t wait to get home from work on Friday (currently stuck on the other side of the country 🫠)

      Edit: also, can I somehow buy you a beer/coffee somewhere digitally?