The main issue with this is that a Kindle is not a typical Linux environment; they use heavily patched kernels that range from old to hideously old depending on the age of the device, have a severely stripped down userspace similar to most other embedded devices and it's a pain to set up the development tools needed to compile software against the various libc/kernel versions used across the Kindle family.
That's fine if you're using the built-in kernel as a souped-up display driver. All you need is a way to make pixels happen, the rest can happen off-device.
Exactly I'm in a process of turning one Kindle into a openhab panel.
I failed a bit during the soldering part (the pads got unglued, so now I need to push hard a conductive cable, until I get wifi and ssh up and working).
This post will greatly help me because I mostly need that: wifi and ssh working (and then make the pixels happen :), but I saw a solution for that on mobileread forums).
This project could definitely be considered repurposing - there's pretty much nothing happening in this article that hasn't already been covered in much greater detail on the Kindle Developers Corner over at MobileRead: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=150.
