Kindle Fire is accessible to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean port

Ever since it launched, the Kindle Fire has been hacked like no tomorrow. Earlier this week, Google open-sourced Android (Jelly Bean) 4.1 for third-party modification. As such, nobody should be surprised to learn Kindle Fire owners can now install Jelly Bean on their tablet. 

Over on XDA Developers, forum user "Hashcode" revealed that he has ported Google's latest mobile OS to the device. Amazon will probably not be very pleased, but anyone who knows that their Kindle Fire is outdated will be jumping up and down. There's currently no hardware video acceleration support, and enabling Wi-Fi is a pain, but it's definitely a start. 

It is now my job to give you the usual warnings. If you're not feeling confident, don't bother doing it. Stick with whatever you currently have on your Kindle Fire, either the custom version of Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) or something later.

You're going to be rooting your device. You're going to be installing custom software. You're going to have to do it all the way through. You may end up bricking your device and rendering it useless. You may have to do some extra tinkering. You may run into problems (this is the first build, and it's labeled as a beta). 

Hashcode has provided the following to-do list for himself, which should give you an idea of what's to come:

• Fix the wifi script.
• Wifi location fix.
• Add superuser and a compatible su binary.
• Default CPU to 1.2ghz instead of 1ghz.
• Fix slower I/O performance via init*.rc script changes.
• Add Terminal Emulator.
• Add File Manager.
• Fix HD Codecs.
• Fix the over rotation issue in frameworks/base.
• Probably lower headphone volume a bit.
• Add in the libwvm file.
• Change Bootanimation.
• Figure out /emmc sharing issues.

With all that out of the way, the download links you need are as follows: ROM and Google apps. The basic instructions are simple: "Flash in recovery, wipe data/cache and reboot." If you want more, Liliputing has put together a detailed walk-through of the process. 

from zdnet