Can Kolibri Be Used On Amazon Fire Tablets?

Hello,
I am currently in the process of trying to plan a system that will allow us to implement Kolibri in a community of 400 children. This has proved to be quite a challenging feat. I have looked at all available tablet options to use as clients, which are quite minimal with an extremely low budget for each unit. However, I have discovered that Amazon Fire tablets can be purchased for just $50. I was wondering if Kolibri can be run on Fire tablets, if there will ever be a Kolibri app on the Amazon marketplace, and the difficulties of configuring LAN tablets with the Amazon OS as opposed to the simplicity of an Android tablet.

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Jkrzmin,

Yes they work fine. I set up a network for the first time in July for an orphanage in Mexico. This is our first effort, and I am not an IT person.

We are trying some different tablets, but have 6 kindle fire (kid version). We were looking for something that had a decent warranty and was rugged and affordable.

Essentially, you set up server with a wireless access point. Connect the Kindle fire to the wireless access point in the and then open the Kindle browser (Silk? I think).

You will need the specific URL from the Kolibri server. The documentation walks you through this. I think ours was https:\192.168.1.110:8080. We set up the server to have a static IP address to the wireless access point so that we would not have to change the address on the kindles each time.

I don’t think you need a Kolibri app per se as the browser should be able to do it.

As I said, we just did this in July 2018 so I don’t have a lot of feedback as to how well they are working. We were able to get them to work and connect and run videos. I got one of those “gaming” type wireless access points so in theory, should be able to handle more wireless overhead.

I would have liked to do more “stress testing” with multiple devices simultaneously to see the impact on performance.

I hope that is helpful. I can give you more details if you want to offline.

Thanks.

Pete

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Thanks, Pete! One additional thing to note: We have similarly tested on Amazon Fire tablets and it works well, but we encourage you to download Chrome as you may run into some difficulties with the pre-installed browser.

Many thanks,
Lauren

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Hello! I am trying to set up Kolibri on Kindle fire tablets but they are not working after the file is downloaded. As in the file will not open or start any program. As suggested on the community posts, kindle fires are compatible with Kolibri but I cannot find instructions for this device. One potential struggle may be the use of Silk internet not Google or Firefox which may not be allowed on such devices. The NGO is traveling to Madagascar on Saturday and our hope was to have these devices ready for the schools by then. Please share with me any possible guidance or resolutions to this problem. Keep up the good work!!

Hi @Samantha_Elam,

As this is an older thread, the Amazon Fire tablets were likely used to access a Kolibri server running on a network via the tablet’s browser. You’re correct the Amazon Silk browser isn’t one of Kolibri’s supported browsers, but I see that the browser is based on Chromium, so it may actually work.

For our upcoming v0.16 release of Kolibri, we’ve been working on an optimized version for Android (APK), which could possibly work on Fire tablets since they’re Android based. I don’t know that we’ve tested it thus far on Fire tablets, but the v0.16 release should be out soon. There are unstable APK files available on our Github releases page.

Please do start another thread with any more questions. Thanks!

Regards,
Blaine