I want to buy an ereader described known among others as MDB-106 described here: ambiancetechnology . com . Because I promissed myself never to buy anything (again) that is closed I am trying to see how open it is.
It states there there is Linux 2.6 inside. Also some software updates can be downloaded there. Sofar I have found that there are software updates in the form of zipped files. Unzipping gives two files ebook.img (around 28MB) and qte.img (around 25 MB).
A cat of these files shows some recognizable text mainly text about "GCC" compiler, "libraries" and "crosstool". So the files are obviously not encrypted.
An od of the files show a lot of 00's and FF's so the files are not compressed.
I dd' ed one file to a disk and tried to mount that disk thereafter but to no avail. I tried several mount types but never success. fdisk -l shows no recognizable filesystem type. (it says "Disk doesn't contain a valid partition table"). Unfortunately I am no disk hero so maybe I made some error here(?).
I tried PowerIso but it finds no legitimate image in those files.
I tried tar but also no luck.
I am running out of options. Does somebody have other suggestions?
I did not find many information about this reader but a "Kogan eBook reader" described here: david.boxall.id.au sums it all up. Although it seems not exactly the same reader.
I made an octal dump of the beginning of the file "qte.img". Attached.
It seems the file(s) aren't disk (or other) images, but rather produced by an unusual archiver using a fixed block size (4096 bytes). It's might be possible to extract some files that carry their own size in the header (like the BMP that's contained) using dd, but for a full extract one would have to analyze the archive format & write his own extractor.
A cat of these files shows some recognizable text mainly text about "GCC" compiler, "libraries" and "crosstool". So the files are obviously not encrypted.
An od of the files show a lot of 00's and FF's so the files are not compressed.
I dd' ed one file to a disk and tried to mount that disk thereafter but to no avail. I tried several mount types but never success.
I wonder if it's an initrd or initramfs. I think those are CPIO archives. Have you tried running file ./filename on it to see what it thinks it is?
Quote:
fdisk -l shows no recognizable filesystem
It never would -- fdisk partitions disks, it doesn't understand or care about the contents of partitions.
I see no files attached. I wonder if it blocked them because of your first-post status?
Try hexdump -C filename | head and post that output in code tags, not as an attachment.
Did a file on it, it's reported as an VMS executable, which I find very unlikely with ARM as the target architecture. ELF headers from within the file(s) support this, as they report being compiled with Linux on ARM as the target.
I forgot about cpio (that was a long time ago for me). I tried it but all it said was "malformed number".
The attached file did go wrong so here follows some output of the qte.img file:
It is output of od -ah
Code:
0000000 etx nul nul nul soh nul nul nul del del nul nul nul nul nul nul
0003 0000 0001 0000 ffff 0000 0000 0000
0000020 nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul
0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
*
0000400 nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul del del del m A nul nul
0000 0000 0000 0000 ff00 ffff 41ed 0000
0000420 ht stx nul nul nl stx nul nul Y ff dc3 M ! u l L
0209 0000 020a 0000 0c59 4d13 75a1 4cec
0000440 ! u l L del del del del del del del del del del del del
75a1 4cec ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
0000460 del del del del del del del del del del del del del del del del
ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
*
0000700 del del del del del del del del del del del del nul nul nul nul
ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff 0000 0000
0000720 del del del del del del del del del del del del del del del del
ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
*
0010000 nul dle nul nul soh nul nul nul nul nul nul nul del del nul nul
1000 0000 0001 0000 0000 0000 ffff 0000
0010020 0 g q ? enq nul nul nul enq nul nul nul P g q ?
6730 bff1 0005 0000 0005 0000 6750 bff1
0010040 fs W q ? etx nul nul nul ( g q ? sub dc1 eot bs
571c bff1 0003 0000 6728 bff1 919a 0804
0010060 del del nul nul enq us eot bs del nul nul nul nul nul nul nul
ffff 0000 9f85 0804 00ff 0000 0000 0000
0010100 nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul soh nul nul nul etx nul nul nul
0000 0000 0000 0000 0001 0000 0003 0000
0010120 soh nul nul nul del del nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul
0001 0000 ffff 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
0010140 nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul
0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
*
0010200 soh nul nul nul soh nul nul nul del del o p e n _ s
0001 0000 0001 0000 ffff 706f 6e65 735f
0010220 t a r t . b m p nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul
6174 7472 622e 706d 0000 0000 0000 0000
0010240 nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul nul
0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
Sorry but the layout is a bit messed up.
I did a "file" on this file too and VMS/Alpha as file type seems a bit strange for this device as it is ARM.
As for the cpio: should I use special options to extract files from this supposedly cpio archive?
Thanks for any hints you can give.
And if it leads nowhere I will not buy the ereader: strange all these companies that sell products with doubtfull applications (I read that on a dutch ereader forum) and at the same time preventing anybody to do something about these problems. I am old enough to know that support for such a product will stop at the time it works more or less or when they made a new product that supposedly is much better.
Moderator's Comments:
Please use [CODE] tags for commands, listings, console output, ...
One thing you can do, since we already verified it's based on GPL software: demand a copy of the sources used and any changes made to them. Those parts based on GPL software are automatically licensed as GPL too, and thus have to be provided as machine-readable source code (means: files, not printout).
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