Tridge confesses: I'm a Sony Reader fan

linux.conf.au 2008, Melbourne | Linux.conf.au wouldn't be complete without Andrew 'Tridge' Tridgell giving a presentation on the latest developments in Samba, but attendees who turned up early for his talk this year got an unexpected insight into another one of his passions: the Sony Reader.

With the crowd steadily building 20 minutes before his talk on Clustered Samba kicked off, Tridge decided to amuse the crowd by demonstrating some recent hacks he's performed on the Sony Reader, originally purchased as a matrimonial present.

"It's the first ebook reader that passes the test for my wife. She wanted something that felt like reading a book."

Sony has consistently refused to release the Reader -- well-regarded for its on-screen display and ease-of-use -- in the Australian market, which has led many Aussies to conclude that owning one is pointless, since the Sony software won't allow the purchase of books from unsupported locations.

"It's all not true," Tridge commented. " There are very few sites that are willing to ship overseas, but I found one."

Sony Reader: they refused to release it in Australia, so Tridge did what he does best and worked out an alternate method of buying it and loading books on to it.

"You can in fact get books and buy them with PayPal and you don't need to use the Sony software and sign your life away. There is a great little program called libprs500 you can use instead."

Devices such as the Sony Reader or Amazon's Kindle, both of which run Linux, are likely to be increasingly prominent, Tridge predicted. "These sort of little tablets and things are what I think we might be using as computing devices in the future."

Of course, for Linux enthusiasts, a sealed device with no keyboard might seem disturbingly difficult to customise. However, the reality is somewhat simpler.

"They're all eminently hackable," Tridge said. "I was wondering how I was going to get into it, but it turns out that if you put a file called autorun.sh on a memory stick and insert it, it runs it, and it runs as root. So it's not a difficult hack.

Given the proclivities of the audience, Tridge couldn't resist a slight dig at Microsoft. "I discovered if you plugged it into a Windows box over USB with an SD card inserted, the battery drained in just a few hours, because Windows was constantly probing the card.