This post describes, how you get custom screen savers on your Kindle 4 NT (Non Touch). This requires root access via USBnet or via WiFi – these two are described in their own posts.
Connect to your Kindle, either via USBnet or WiFi.
After you have a writeable filesystem, we make the system think, that the screen saver pictures are in your Kindle root folder. This will be good for you, because then you can just add pictures to a folder on your Kindle in ‘normal’ mode.
If you are connected via USBnet:
- Make file system writeable
- Create a screen saver folder in your base directory
- Mount the main file system
-
- You can now either move all the amazon screen savers to your new folder, so that you can replace them and/or add custom ones.
mv /mnt/base-mmc/opt/amazon/screen_saver/600x800/* /mnt/us/screensaver/
With the second command, you remove the empty old folder.
rm -r /mnt/base-mmc/opt/amazon/screen_saver/600x800 - Or you can move the folder to a ‘backup’ location, so that you can restore the default screen savers at a later time.
mv /mnt/base-mmc/opt/amazon/screen_saver/600x800 /mnt/base-mmc/opt/amazon/screen_saver/600x800.old
- You can now either move all the amazon screen savers to your new folder, so that you can replace them and/or add custom ones.
- Now create a link, so that your Kindle thinks your screen savers are still at the same location:
ln -sfn /mnt/us/screensaver /mnt/base-mmc/opt/amazon/screen_saver/600x800
mntroot rw
mkdir /mnt/us/screensaver
mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/base-mmc
If you are connected via SSH over WiFi:
- Make file system writeable
- Create a screen saver folder in your base directory
-
- You can now either move all the amazon screen savers to your new folder, so that you can replace them and/or add custom ones.
mv /opt/amazon/screen_saver/600x800/* /mnt/us/screensaver/
With the second command, you remove the empty old folder.
rm -r /opt/amazon/screen_saver/600x800 - Or you can move the folder to a ‘backup’ location, so that you can restore the default screen savers at a later time.
mv /opt/amazon/screen_saver/600x800 /opt/amazon/screen_saver/600x800.old
- You can now either move all the amazon screen savers to your new folder, so that you can replace them and/or add custom ones.
- Now create a link, so that your Kindle thinks your screen savers are still at the same location:
ln -sfn /mnt/us/screensaver /mnt/base-mmc/opt/amazon/screen_saver/600x800
mntroot rw
mkdir /mnt/us/screensaver
Last step:
If you now restart your Kindle, either by disabling diagnostics mode or through settings (for both see root access), your kindle will load your custom folder. Connect your Kindle via USB to your computer and – oh wonder – there is a folder called ‘screensaver’ on your Kindle. Add your custom screen savers into this folder. For best results, use 600×800 pixels, png-format and name them like the original files (01N.png, 02N.png, … 99N.png).
If you name it like the original files, it’s also easy to define the sequence of screen savers.
Hi,
Could you explain how your would reverse all of this so you can get your Kindle back to how it was?
Thanks
It’s fortunately not rocket science. If you were careful enough to back up the screensavers of course.
1\ Boot in diagnostics mode, enable USBNet log in as root over SSH.
2\ Access the filesystem as writable:
mntroot rw
3\ Delete your screensavers folder on the sdcard. This will clear the symbolic link too:
rm -r /mnt/us/screensaver
4\ Copy the backup of the screensaver folder to it’s original place
mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/base-mmc
mv /mnt/base-mmc/opt/amazon/screen_saver/600x800.old/mnt/base-mmc/opt/amazon/screen_saver/600x800
5\ Not sure if this is relevant but just to be sure
mntroot r
6\ Reboot your kindle by exiting the diagnostics mode.
You can now update your kindle software (I’m guessing that this is what you want to do). After you updated you can redo this screensavers hack again.