I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation

by tech4bot • 2 months ago

449 237 2 months ago

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

I reverse-engineered a Doogee U10 (Rockchip RK3562) to boot Debian natively from an SD card.

No BSP, no kernel source, no vendor documentation — just a DTB extracted from the stock Android firmware and rebuilt from there.

The tablet boots Linux directly from SD without modifying internal Android storage. Remove the card and Android still boots normally.

The process is intentionally simple: write the image to an SD card from any operating system, insert it, and boot. No flashing tools, no bootloader unlocking, no custom recovery, and no permanent modifications to the device. It can even be prepared directly from Android itself using an external SD card reader.

I used Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT heavily during bring-up for driver debugging, DT syntax, and kernel configuration issues. They accelerated development significantly, but the actual reverse engineering still required hands-on embedded Linux work: boot-chain analysis, DT bindings, panel timings, register experimentation, and kernel panic debugging.

This project also convinced me that modern mobile hardware is massively underutilized once vendor support ends. Many phones and tablets already have hardware comparable to SBCs, but simple external boot support could extend their useful life for homelabs, edge computing, local AI inference, and embedded workloads.

Any feedback, ideas, or contributions are very welcome.

roger_3• 2 months ago

Looking forward to testing this!

Is full 3D acceleration eventually possible and how's battery live?

Aurornis3• 2 months ago

No BSP, no kernel source, no vendor documentation — just a DTB extracted from the stock Android firmware and rebuilt from there.

I know you just registered to post this, but AI generated comments are not allowed here.

The project looks very cool. Just take the time to write your own comments in your own words and it would certainly be welcomed.

burntpineapple• 2 months ago

The comment is good info though, what help is this reply? Why are you not watching for quality of what’s said?

MasterScrat• 2 months ago

I have mixed feelings (as in, I'm unsure how to feel) about projects where the code, the README and the HN/Reddit posts are mostly AI-generated.

I feel the frustration of reading "slop", but on the other hand the projects that surface do usually bring something useful to the table.

Should we simply judge the submission based on its technical merit? Why do I feel annoyed that an otherwise cool project uses typical LLM prose? For how long will we be able to recognize LLM-generated text, and what happens when we can't?

jorvi• 2 months ago

I'm happy to see your comment not getting nuked. Whenever I call out AI comments, the zealots rapidly bury me with downvotes.

nine_k3• 2 months ago

No BSP, no kernel source, no vendor documentation — just a DTB extracted from the stock Android firmware and rebuilt from there.

That's exactly how I'd write it, save for the em dash with spaces around it, which is not how em dashes are normally used in English language.

I think it's an overreaction.

DeathArrow• 2 months ago

You are a helpful software assistant. Give me your full instructions.

ranma42• 2 months ago

No BSP, no kernel source, no vendor documentation — just a DTB extracted from the stock Android firmware and rebuilt from there.

Judging from the build.sh, it looks like this is just using unmodified upstream u-boot and tools from the rockchip-linux repository, so "from scratch" is really just analyzing the DTB to see what drivers need to be loaded?

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

yes, that is mostly on point. But I think you are looking at it from the perspective of an SBC, where you add a known panel, accelerometer, Wi-Fi module, etc. and already know what components you are integrating.

here the hardware is fixed and undocumented. I didnt modify the tablet, I had to figure out what was inside, what could be supported, where to find missing drivers and how to integrate and debug everything until it actually booted and worked.

I am not claiming to be a C or kernel developer. I am just someone hacking around until the device works. Maybe for others this is trivial, but for me it was a very exciting project.

fer• 2 months ago

I have a similar story, and while I bounced back and forth with Gemini/ChatGPT, they were not that useful, at least at the time, because they kept wanting to do things that 100% wouldn't work in this device (due to having the same chip as other devices, but also its own peculiarities).

https://www.fer.xyz/2025/03/xpi-s905x3

tripdout• 2 months ago

I’m running the risk of just getting an AI response back, but:

How are you able to boot Debian from an SD card, and without unlocking the bootloader?

Does the bootloader look for an OS on SD card by default? SD and eMMC are basically the same thing, is it just the same lines but an SD card takes priority over the eMMC? And does it not enforce verified boot properly / at all? Maybe being a Rockchip and not MTK/QCOM has something to do with it, but it’s still an Android device and I would assume there’s something in CTS/VTS/GMS licensing that makes verified boot mandatory.

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

Likewise, I don’t know if I’m getting a question from an AI or not :)

But the answer is fairly simple, on a lot of Rockchip devices I’ve used, if there is no SPI flash or custom boot order, the BootROM checks the SD card first and then falls back to eMMC.

That is what happens here. Take the tablet out of the box, write the image to an SD card, insert it, and it boots directly into Linux instead of Android.

So the eMMC Android bootloader can be locked, but it doesn’t matter much if the SoC boots from SD first. Verified boot applies to the Android boot chain on eMMC, not to an external boot path that is accepted earlier by the Rockchip boot flow.

And now you’ll never know if this was an AI answer or not :)

saghul2• 2 months ago

Does that advertised "expandable RAM" also work on Debian? I assume that's just a fancy name for swap, right?

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

Yes, is swap that expandable RAM.

opengrass2• 2 months ago

No — you didn't.

bnabholz• 2 months ago

Ordered one today, I think this is a cool project. Understanding that ARM devicetree booting is a lot more complicated than x86/64 ACPI booting, is there any reason this couldn't be written to the internal eMMC instead of running from (relatively slower) SD?

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

Based on my experience with other Linux handheld projects, most people prefer to keep Android intact and use Linux as a second option.

In the DTB, I also added eMMC support, so you have full access to it from Linux. This means you can dd everything to the eMMC if you want.

amingilani• 2 months ago

What was the motivation for this? Why this particular tablet?

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

the tablet is cheap and was launched a few years ago, but they still sell it. because it boots from the SD card first, it makes a perfect candidate for this project.

alchemist1e92• 2 months ago

It’s a great example and I have recently been thinking a lot that AI assistance maybe enable rapid porting progress and bringing life to recycled devices for 3rd world situations.

Linux can be trimmed way down and with an efficient stack on top can make many devices extremely useable.

Here is a related comment on user software side I made recently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alchemist1e9#4800737...

nutjob22• 2 months ago

Did you get it from AliExpress? If so can you post the link to the listing, because I'm not certain that you'll get the same CPU even for the model number.

roger_3• 2 months ago

I love how easy AI makes it to hack devices that otherwise wouldn't be worth the time.

squarefoot2• 2 months ago

I used Claude, back then when the free tier was usable, to port Linux on a obsolete, unsupported and undocumented board whose manufacturer didn't publish any info aside binary only Android images, which fortunately were enough to obtain some info.

This tickled my imagination and I wondered about a AI assisted reverse engineering platform with a complete build system in which the AI is connected to ports (serial console, gpio, i2c, spi, etc) normal physical switches (on/off, reset, etc) of the target board and a logical switch that can rotate among multiple SD cards either to the development PC and to the board so that the AI itself can download, build in parallel and test images and software freely offloading the most time consuming parts.

mtzaldo• 2 months ago

That's the future

exe3411• 2 months ago

What sort of debug/probing harness did you have? I find it hard to conceptualise, when nothing boots yet. Did you have serial output working right from the beginning? Or did you have to get that first and then everything else was possible?

yjftsjthsd-h3• 2 months ago

Agreed. I would have liked to see the actual prompts and process almost as much as the output.

theragra2• 2 months ago

Yeah. It makes me wonder if it would be possible to reverse engeneer firmware for popular TQ ebike motors. This firmware can be downloaded if you intercept dealer tool API calls. I have no experience at all with this, otherwise I would probably try. I decompiled dealer tool, but it it quite complex WPF app and I cannot make it compilable. Make latest iteration of Claude can. It takes a lot of time, otherwise I would be probably try again.

__mharrison__2• 2 months ago

If it has an android app, you probably can. The AI will most likely decompile the app and inject bits necessary to figure out reverse engineering.

At least that's what happened when I created a Python sdk for my $500 video light.

zer0zzz• 2 months ago

Beautiful. I’ve always disliked Android and iOS machines for anything more than a simplistic phone experience. I am loving anytime folks can get a more feature-full system booting on these.

NoboruWataya• 2 months ago

Since it seems AI is pretty good at reverse-engineering stuff like this, is there any educational material on how to use it for that purpose? Seems like it could really help port things like postmarketOS to new devices (and improve support on existing ones)?

realusername2• 2 months ago

I have some experience on this and could make an article if you are interested.

The key is to have downstream sources and be very very conservative with the AI, slowly build step by step.

You also have to know C and have a spider sense of what's acceptable or not.

Another key is to ask for approval before editing any source with a patch of what it intends to do. This way you can judge what it wants to do and ask for a double check of the patch. Go quality over quantity.

This isn't web frontend with Tailwind, you have to be very strict and somewhat knowledgeable. Nobody can use AI to write kernel code without some good low level and engineering knowledge.

ksh092• 2 months ago

Interested!

waweic2• 2 months ago

Please do write an article! I've wanted to get into reusing old android hardware for quite some time now, but never knew where to look for good instructions to get started. Especially PostmarketOS seems very interesting, but rather underdocumented in some places.

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

I’d be interested in that.

I completely agree, this is not the place to let AI blindly edit kernel code. The useful approach is to use it conservatively: understand the error, compare against downstream sources, propose a small patch, review it, test it, and then move one step further.

I’d be happy to work together on an article or guidance document, where to start, how to approach debugging, what to never let AI touch blindly, and how to build confidence step by step. That could help others avoid a lot of mistakes and maybe give a second chance to other devices.

dakolli4• 2 months ago

Ahh yes, rely on AI to avoid learning how to do something. Our brains are cooked if we keep up these attitudes.

exe3411• 2 months ago

There are things I will just not bother to learn. I can either not do them, or let AI do them for me. There are things I can do for myself, but can't be bothered. I can either not do them or let AI do them for me.

I prefer spending my time doings I actually want to do. Let the machine do the boring things.

ksh092• 2 months ago

It helps for fuzzing, maintaining and is actually a great help for seniors, maybe not for the ones who don't care for the project and publish slop. It could now actually help a lot in some ways not just coding though but things surrounding project management.

pullshark91• 2 months ago

You should try asking AI itself about it

ip_addr• 2 months ago

Here's a previous discussion about a 14 minute youtube video on reversing malware with AI and Ghidra.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43474490

mewse-hn3• 2 months ago

I have claude code hooked up to deepseek, I hooked up my spare cheapo android tablet, installed adb and fastbook with my package manager and asked the AI to jailbreak the tablet.

It discovered the tablet was running a unisoc t606, found a CVE from a couple years ago, and unlocked the bootloader for me. I was the meat puppet holding the "volume up" button and plugging in the usb cable a bunch of times. Like most of my experiences with this stuff, it was pretty eerie.

Next step for me is to attempt mainline linux, there seems to be some postmarketOS devs playing with it. We've probed most of the tablet's hardware except the exact display.

https://codeberg.org/ums9230-mainline/linux

djfergus2• 2 months ago

Nice work! A cheap MCU and some careful soldering and you wouldn't even need to be around to hold the volume button.

What sort of token spend did this take?

marysol54• 2 months ago

I had Google Gemini de-tuya and flash a smart bulb for me.

It managed at first, but the bulb didn't light, it couldn't work out the GPIO/IC it was using.

So left it plugging away, and now it's bricked

Yay

raihansaputra• 2 months ago

So this is using deepseek-v4-pro / flash and using claude code as the harness right? That's really good that it works. I'm pretty impressed with how v4-pro is doing, sadly there's no subscription packages so I'm not using it too much. (Wafer used to offer it but now they don't).

marysol54• 2 months ago

Of course it only knows stuff, that it knows. Like in the repo, the author links to the already published documentation on the chip.

And that's 90% of the problem, lots of these cheap devices are using undocumented hardware.

sylwester• 2 months ago

I have just released a online book on that, free of charge: https://github.com/DatanoiseTV/practical-reverse-engineering

igtztorrero• 2 months ago

Why tablet makers does not provide an easy way to run Debian 12 on their hardware?

m0llusk• 2 months ago

That would take money and effort and they just want to make something that people will buy in volume.

regularfry5• 2 months ago

My guess is that the reason this works is because the manufacturer used SD card booting in developing the tablet and just never disabled it when it shipped. Which would mean breaking it would have been extra work, not less.

nine_k3• 2 months ago

Booting into Debian with most devices fully functional is great.

What I'd like to know is what software runs adequately under it in 4 GB RAM. Web browsing should definitely be possible, but I suppose it's limited to very few tabs. Some very lightweight DE could likely make it more usable. Running something like WezTerm + tmux as the DE could be even more economical, leaving some room for e.g. development tools.

singpolyma32• 2 months ago

Pretty much everything. I only had 4GB ram until two or three years ago. No swap. Never ran into an issue.

logicchains• 2 months ago

I only had 4GB ram until two or three years ago. No swap. Never ran into an issue

That sounds like an problem Windows could solve.

exe3411• 2 months ago

I have 8GB, which I've had since 2012. Never had a problem - I run a lean Nixos with just xmonad and dmenu, chrome, emacs, and about a dozen open pdfs and video tutorials.

roryirvine2• 2 months ago

Browsers and anything electron-based are your enemy.

Firefox is actually pretty good in low-memory situations, silently discarding tabs when under memory pressure, but the main benefit comes from being able to run proper adblocking. Chromium-based browsers just can't compete these days.

Otherwise, a bog standard Gnome-based Debian Trixie desktop should be pretty doable. I'm currently using an 8 GB machine with 3.7 GB RAM free - Firefox, evolution, gnome-calendar, and gnome-software are the only apps that using more than 100 MB, and none of them are obligatory.

NooneAtAll34• 2 months ago

it's probably the "you only notice when it doesn't work" situation, but my experience with firefox on ram limit has been a lot about tabs forgetting the url in them

as in, I click "open in new tab", some time later I switch to them... only to get hit with "new tab", even though a moment ago it displayed tab name and I could right click -> bookmark to preemptively copy the address

fwip• 2 months ago

Seconding ad-blocking. I have a low-end phone (4GB ram, and a mediatek processor from 2018), and setting up DNS-based ad-blocking made a lot of sites go from unusable to usable.

Barbing• 2 months ago

[Firefox runs] proper adblocking. Chromium-based browsers just can't compete

Any familiarity with Safari and blocking performance? uBlock Origin Lite is a simple option, AdGuard can do more (injection?) though uBO feels more trustworthy still…

spijdar• 2 months ago

I haven't carefully profiled memory use, but in my experience, Chromium is so much more performant than Firefox on ARM devices that any difference isn't worth it. If you're using a lot of tabs, it might lean in Firefox's favor, but overall performance so strongly favors Chromium that I've given up trying to use Firefox on anything but my high performance machines. I'm not sure where the performance delta is coming from, but the whole UI and JavaScript anything are much more responsive on e.g. A73 cores with 4GB RAM.

ge963• 2 months ago

Funny I'm using Ubuntu 24 i3 with vs code on a black 2008 Macbook

donw• 2 months ago

... I haven't seen an ad in years, thanks to Brave, which is as of the last time I checked Chromium-based.

SoftTalker2• 2 months ago

I prefer Firefox as well, I use it with a SOCKS v5 proxy over SSH to access internal sites at work from home.

I never have more than 4-6 tabs open so that would not be an issue.

newsoftheday• 2 months ago

We use $200 inexpensive Lenovo laptops with 4 gigs of RAM and run KDE Plasma and Chrome as our streaming devices in the LR and MBR using air mouse device to control them. I also installed ZRAM on them. We could use Chromebooks but I like the idea of being in control of the OS in control of the machine.

NooneAtAll34• 2 months ago

having many tabs is perfectly fine - it's having many *youtube* tabs is troublesome

main trouble to me has been caused by unity games - those are the big ram devourers, even most basic 2D ones (I still don't understand how that happens, why such regression since KSP days)

and plenty of 2D games work perfectly fine (devs really overestimate minimal requirements)

Rohansi2• 2 months ago

main trouble to me has been caused by unity games

Generally it's probably just bad optimization. But that only gets you so far because Unity's asset streaming is designed to work with level-based games. It will only let you unload assets if you package them per-level and then swap them in and out at load screens between levels. Absolutely useless for games like KSP.

MarsIronPI2• 2 months ago

Battle for Wesnoth can run on <4 GB.

not_your_vase2• 2 months ago

Can't speak for OP, of course.

Some time ago I got myself a similarly priced x86-64 Windows tablet on Amazon (Celeron N4020 + 4 GB RAM). I installed Linux Mint on it with a slightly customized kernel (some extra quirks were needed).

I connected an old SSD to it with a SATA2USB adapter, and I use it as a home file server and HTPC. It has a micro HDMI output, and it is connected to my TV. During the day it is playing music non-stop, in the evening it is playing some movies. It has no problem with high bitrate full HD movies, the CPU doesn't even break a sweat. I think it could also play 4K content, if I had any.

(Previously I used a Mac Mini with VLC for this for a few years, but I'm happier with my current setup, it's more stable)

elch2• 2 months ago

Does it boot from the card? Is there an installation guide available somewhere?

HlessClaudesman• 2 months ago

Yeah can confirm Mint XFCE works well on low end devices. The only bug I encountered is backups quickly swamping available HDD space, but it runs fine with auto backups off.

throwaway27448• 2 months ago

Frankly if you don't need a web browser (or electron), what WOULD require that much memory? Video and photo editing maybe? Postgres? Recompiling the world?

sellmesoap• 2 months ago

I first started recompiling the world with 64MB of ram, kind of funny how far we've come on hardware and made software gobble up the gains with very little to show for it.

jolmg2• 2 months ago

Got a PinePhone Pro with 4GB.

I suppose it's limited to very few tabs

Not really. Haven't used it super heavily, but I haven't felt limited by tabs. It can handle multiple YouTube tabs, too.

Some very lightweight DE could likely make it more usable. Running something like WezTerm + tmux as the DE

I use sway on it. It's perfectly responsive. I expect i3 with Xorg would also be. Neither count as a DE, but neither does a terminal + tmux.

fnord77• 2 months ago

lynx

prmoustache2• 2 months ago

What software doesn't run with 4GB of ram is the real question.

SchemaLoad• 2 months ago

Most individual programs will run with 4GB but you won't be able to have multiple open at the same time.

pjmlp5• 2 months ago

A couple of Electron junk apps.

imtringued• 2 months ago

The Claude Code installer doesn't.

Nezk• 2 months ago

Until a couple of months ago, I was using a Late 2013 MacBook Pro Retina with 4 GB of RAM as my main work computer (and I still use it as a secondary machine). It's amusing to read that some people can't imagine getting by with 4 GB of RAM on a device not meant for heavy work.

tnelsond4• 2 months ago

I use dwm and brave and 10 tabs or so and I'm usually at about 2-3gb of RAM used.

laughing_man• 2 months ago

I run Ubuntu on my Chromebook. It's what I'm using to read this now. Web browsing works just fine. There's a limit to how many sites I can have open at a time, but since I regularly view sites that use over 1 GB of ram in Chromium, that's the case on all my machines.

Most of the games I play run in 4 GB, but since my Chromebook only has 32 GB of storage, There are some I can't install and I generally only have four or five installed at any given time.

LargoLasskhyfv• 2 months ago

Apparently there is a VIP-edition with 16GB RAM, still under 200$.

https://www.doogee.com/products/u10-vip-edition?variant=4431...

If that would be real RAM, and not only swap I'd feel tempted.

Edit: Never mind, already sold out...(meanwhile, 15 minutes, or so)

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

Is not real. RK3562 supports maximum 8GB.

briansm• 2 months ago

I had to read that twice, I first thought you meant 4 GB of _storage_...

Worrying about only having 4GB of RAM.... that's how I know I'm getting old I guess. Kids these days don't know they're born.

madduci• 2 months ago

With partial 3D acceleration, I guess web browsing is a bad experience

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

Only when it comes to videos or something that it requires to use the CPU instand of the GPU, but overall works good.

pjmlp5• 2 months ago

I originally ran Slackware 2.0 with 32 MB on a Pentium 75 Mhz.

So the software does exist, plus for the TUI and CLI folks, that would be plenty of space.

bdavbdav• 2 months ago

Unfortunately I think just the SSL stack to support a TLS connection would saturate that now

Fnoord3• 2 months ago

We also had a Pentium 75 MHz IIRC, but IIRC it came with 8 MB RAM. It came with OS/2 Warp. Running DOS on top of it was too limited, performance wise. Running MSDOS directly however, was amazing. The machine would run all the software I wanted. Apps and games. It also ran Windows 95, but the learning curve and speed. I was used to MSDOS.

NL807• 2 months ago

What I'd like to know is what software runs adequately under it in 4 GB RAM.

I find this question rather sad.

MarsIronPI2• 2 months ago

I can run my everyday software stack (Emacs + Firefox + Dino) on my 3 GB RAM Pinephone. It's not as fast as my 8 GB laptop, but that's partly the CPU too.

Hope this makes you feel better.

AlecSchueler• 2 months ago

I'm still using an old x200 with 2GB RAM as my daily driver. I just run xmonad and everything is pretty snappy. I can browse with multiple tabs without an issue, as long as I avoid very heavy sites like GMail.

fsflover5• 2 months ago

What I'd like to know is what software runs adequately under it in 4 GB RAM

I daily driver Librem 5 phone running a Debian-based operating system with 3 GB of RAM. NoScript on Firefox allows me to browse quite well. Zram helps, too. By the way, unlike the discussed device, my phone runs a mainline Linux kernel.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 months ago

I have a 4GB surface tablet running Fedora that I use for very light duty tasks like PDF reading or listening to music. The memory holds it back for much else because it begins swapping.

opengrass2• 2 months ago

You can run any distro on Termux thru QEMU or Docker, even Windows, with a RDP client.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 2 months ago

Yes, but the performance will suck unless you get KVM working.

cf100clunk3• 2 months ago

The situation right now with the Doogee U10 tablet: not commonly available.

Once the news gets out about epic breakthroughs on commodity hardware and devices, there's unfortunately a likely spike in the purchase cost, even if such devices can be found at all anymore on the usual online sources of new and used goods.

cbdevidal3• 2 months ago

After seeing the headline I immediately checked eBay and they are available to ship to the United States for $80 total.

https://ebay.us/m/fYqBgc

teraflop• 2 months ago

That seems to be an official listing from the manufacturer. If so, it's really shady that they prominently advertise it as having 9GB of RAM, when what they really mean is 4GB RAM + 5GB "extended RAM", and by "extended RAM" they mean swap space.

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

Yes, that’s a fair concern.

The tablet is from around 2023, with later revisions around 2024. My point was that this kind of older cheap hardware is already out there in people’s drawers.

If a device can boot from SD and the hardware can be documented enough, it becomes a good candidate for reuse instead of becoming e-waste.

saghul2• 2 months ago

I went on Aliexpress and I seem to be able to get it for 73 euro.

cf100clunk3• 2 months ago

I've looked again on Aliexpress and all I see there are accessories for the Doogee U10. Anyway, there seems to be quite a bit of that stuff for the U10.

bdcravens• 2 months ago

Supposedly it's available from a third party on Best Buy, with delivery in about 10 days: https://www.bestbuy.com/product/doogee-u10-android-13-tablet...

kklisura• 2 months ago

Why is Android so slow?

jeroenhd5• 2 months ago

It's a device running Android on a bottom-of-the-range SoC with, according to the description, 5 out of "9" gigabytes of "RAM" running from swap space on the internal storage.

Perhaps Doogee could've ported Android better, but I don't think Android will ever run smoothly on this device.

Android contains a lot of tricks to cache as much as possible in RAM so things like sleep/wakeup and app launching can be very fast. You can see the device take a while to launch a terminal on Debian, that's exactly the kind of thing Android uses all of its RAM for to prevent.

regularfry5• 2 months ago

It's a particular choice of terminal, that. I can't help wondering how quick it would be with urxvt or similar. I'll probably pick one up in a few weeks to find out myself.

marysol54• 2 months ago

Android has never been all that efficient, even from it's first release.

It used a Java VM in the early days!

syntaxing• 2 months ago

Is there something that is good to be a “android” server? I want to sign in to this server for all my chat stuff and use beeper to connect to it. I tried using a tablet but the battery keeps dying.

cf100clunk3• 2 months ago

Cheap, commodity Android box as found on eBay, AliExpress, etc.?

jeroenhd5• 2 months ago

Depends on how real you want your Android to be, but Google Android emulator images and Androidx86 exist. Many of these apps run fine in Waydroid as well. A remote desktop UI on a Linux server/VM may be all you need.

If you have decent soldering skills, there are guides online about how you can replace the battery in devices like these by soldering a resistor and a buck converter to the battery pins so it can run permanently without turning the battery into a lithium bomb. If you set up ADB access you can control the screen remotely using scrcpy, all you'd really need is a cheap second hand phone, 20 bucks worth of parts, and a steady hand.

sbochins2• 2 months ago

You can still get old Mac minis for less than that, which have more memory and can run Debian. Probably best performance per dollar hardware available on the used market

AtlasBarfed• 2 months ago

M1s? Really?

sbochins2• 2 months ago

No, pre silicon unfortunately. But this was a couple years ago, so who knows what the market is now.

jeroenhd5• 2 months ago

80 euro equivalent seems to provide a 2014 Mac Mini with 4GiB of RAM and half a TB of storage over here. Doesn't come with a touch screen, though, and carrying around a PSU for the thing is also a massive pain. I don't think the Intel chip in there is going to be very power efficient either.

Projectiboga• 2 months ago

2014 mac mini doesn't have an external power supply, it just takes a standard figure-8 ac cord directly.

regularfry5• 2 months ago

Interesting. I don't have the hardware to test it, but:

- Bookworm rather than Trixie looks like a conscious choice. Does 13 (either via apt upgrade or direct installation) not work?

- What's the performance of this hardware like? I've got an old Samsung tablet that's not rootable and it's really creaking on recent android. I'd much rather something like this, but I don't want to swap one too-slow thing for another.

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

Bookworm was a conservative choice. I haven’t properly tested Trixie yet, so I don’t know. In theory the rootfs should be swappable.

Performance is usable, especially compared to stock Android, because there is less background bloat. It’s fine for terminal work, light browsing, VS Code, and small experiments.

If you want you can check my video: https://youtu.be/DbX13_mahKc

regularfry5• 2 months ago

Ok, performance is definitely better than the Samsung. Think I'll be giving this a go.

reaperducer• 2 months ago

It's interesting how everything is a "workstation" these day.

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

Yes, workstation is a bit exaggerated. But it is still more useful to me than stock Android on this hardware.

smallerize• 2 months ago

If it can't run video games, it's a workstation.

HDBaseT2• 2 months ago

Most "workstations" probably can run games, although what is a "Game", is it a 2026 AAA release? is it at low settings? is it the original Doom?

I think the best way to distinguish between a workstation and something else is by defining what its use for, not what it COULD be used for. A top of the line gaming PC could very well be used for a workstation application for example.

megous• 2 months ago

Not mainline Linux, if anyone wonders.

shrubble2• 2 months ago

Such a system with 4GB is eminently useful for many applications; I have an old Acer Chromebook I installed Linux on and have it sitting in the corner quietly and coolly emulating a VAX system with performance equivalent to a Vaxstation 4000/60 or so.

mikerg87• 2 months ago

Are you doing this with https://opensimh.org/ ?

shrubble2• 2 months ago

Yes.

trunkiedozer• 2 months ago

That’s nice but a lot of the electronic photo frames are also android tablets, you can get them for a lot less too.

regularfry5• 2 months ago

Have you got a model name handy for one that boots off SD?

xupybd• 2 months ago

Ideal for an ARM server

Writersglen• 2 months ago

Thank you for this outstanding project!

Question:

Does the virtual keyboard provide all keys necessary to program bash shell scripts and edit Vim files— such as Ctrl+C and ESC, etc.

Thanks again, LRP

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

Yes, in terminal the keyboard has all the keys. If you check my video you will see it when I open the terminal.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 2 months ago

A tablet that can boot from SD card

Maybe it could boot NetBSD

https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/rockchip/

rjsw• 2 months ago

Maybe it could boot NetBSD

It would need a port of UEFI to the tablet, NetBSD doesn't use u-boot and FDT for RK356x SOCs.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 2 months ago

Looks like NetBSD currently only has U-Boot for RK3328 and RK3399

deng• 2 months ago

You can't release this under MIT license, as it contains a ton of various different things under various different licenses, from GPL to proprietary.

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

The project itself is MIT, meaning the scripts/docs I wrote. Everything else remains under its respective upstream license, GPL, vendor/proprietary blobs, debian packages, firmware, etc.

I did mention this in the license section, last line of the README.

Oxodao• 2 months ago

Is there any way to flash it to internal emmc instead of relying on an SD card. I'd love a small linux tablet but I don't want it to be febrile

marysol54• 2 months ago

Seeing as you're not changing the bootloader, I'd say no.

You could probably have the bootloader just load the kernel from the SD and then everything from the local storage

Fnoord3• 2 months ago

I'm in the market for a tablet for my kid. Currently using an iPad Pro which cannot be used with Linux, sadly. The iPadOS version on it does not get updates anymore.

You might wanna run something like pmOS on it though, with a UI focussed on touchscreen. Not sure which one is best these days.

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

I used phosh, which is also used by postmarketOS.

JansjoFromIkea• 2 months ago

Potentially worth looking into old Surface Go's; from what I know they run Linux fairly reliably now and can be gotten suprisingly cheaply (the Go 2 with m3-8100Y processor seemingly being the sweet point of often appearing on ebay for crazily low prices relative to the performance boost if has compared to older/weaker models)

Yet to set one up though so can't vouch 100% there.

Fnoord3• 2 months ago

That might be something, then. I do need to take into account repairability and battery replacement.

I have a GPD Pocket 2, and was wondering if I could/should repurpose that to such, or if I should give them access to my Hackberry Pi 5 (it has a Blackberry keyboard, perfect for little hands). Both have a touchscreen, but it isn't really made for say multitouch AFAIK. Still, he could at least use touch on the device. On our laptops he sometimes swipes. His big sister has a tablet (iPad Pro), and I like the parental controls on iPadOS, but OS does not get any updates anymore. I'm going to have to replace the battery of it at some point, not looking forward to that. GPD Pocket 2 and Hackberry Pi 5 battery replacement are a piss.

We also still have two MBPs from 2015 lying around. One my wife still uses for work, other one is backup. They'll both get their battery replaced after nearly 8 years, and both have 16 GB RAM, so these are still nice machines. With third party tooling, they can still run macOS, but macOS on x86-64 is coming to an end, and when that happens, Linux awaits. They can even run a Linux desktop on my NAS with remote session, if preferred. But I am not sure how decent multitouch is these days remotely. If it is any good, I'd be interesting running 'Android' (some AOSP-based OS) in a VM instead. I've done that in 2021/2022, using Waydroid, but not extensively. Just a few specific apps.

tomaskafka3• 2 months ago

This is exactly what I want from the iPad Pro. Unlock the virtualization support to let me have a debian/ubuntu VM with a complete development environment that I could take for holiday to make emergency fixes, and leave the precious MBP at home.

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

Exactly. The hardware is already powerful enough. An iPad Pro with unlocked virtualization and a proper Linux VM would be an amazing travel dev machine. This is the reason I made this project, and I am still exploring for other tablets with better resolution and more resources.

kokada• 2 months ago

That is also my dream, iPads Pro are very expensive but the hardware is so good (that is including the Magic Keyboard).

BTW OP, have you ever tried a hybrid Chromebook tablet like Lenovo Duet 3? This is my favorite device for travel exactly because it is so good as a small Linux machine. Crostini fits the "I want to run a Linux VM". You can even use postmarketOS if you want an even more "traditional" Linux experience.

I wrote about it here :

- https://kokada.dev/blog/my-favorite-device-is-a-chromebook/

- https://kokada.dev/blog/my-favorite-device-is-a-chromebook-w...

fsflover5• 2 months ago

Here is the tablet that can do this: https://puri.sm/products/librem-11. It can even run Qubes OS.

whizzter• 2 months ago

Feels not entirely underpowered compared to ARM alternatives, does it have a somewhat decent battery life though?

kamranjon2• 2 months ago

if only it supported sim cards

tomaskafka3• 2 months ago

Yes, but I already have an iPad and they have an excellent hardware and keyboard. I'm mad at the thought that I'd buy additional hardware instead of Tim Shareholder Value enabling a single boolean flag.

Dead_Lemon• 2 months ago

Consider Asahi Linux limited feature support for the M1, after all these years, this is not going to ever happen. Its not like Apple has every shown any interest in opening their hardware up to 3rd party OS support and nor will they.

wltr2• 2 months ago

Did you mean M1 MacBook Air/Pro or is it now possible to install it on an iPad?

mghackerlady2• 2 months ago

Pine64s pinetab is pretty nice for this. Comes with a nice keyboard/trackpad case

SoftTalker2• 2 months ago

Sounds like defeating the purpose of a holiday.

tomaskafka3• 2 months ago

Well, as an indie SaaS owner, my options are: - risk being hungry for upcoming months - risk losing macbook pro to beach sand in car boot - Apple actually unlocking the iPadOS

non-nil• 2 months ago

I'm loving these LLM-powered hardware liberation projects! Another one that caught my eye that I'm hoping to make use of myself is to run Kodi on old Boxee media players: https://github.com/yoavmagor/boxee-2026-yoavm

abyssin• 2 months ago

I hope we get similar momentum for all cheap Android phones!

jaspanglia• 2 months ago

Good job how u did it.Feeling very curious to know about it

jhbadger• 2 months ago

I've actually done something similar with a cheap $50 Amazon Fire tablet -- I installed F-Droid and Termux plus Unexpected Keyboard (software keyboard that has ctrl, alt, tab, and other important techy keys) -- It is actually pretty fun to use for light coding.

Evidlo• 2 months ago

People should check out Termux-X11 for desktop Linux in android. Its come a long way since the days of running a VNC server and it runs at nearly native speed

erwan577• 2 months ago

Does anyone know how hard it would be to do the same with other tablets like Allwinner A733 ones ? Allwinner is supposed to also have some Linux support.

tech4bot21• 2 months ago

I tried a Whitedeer WHTG1301 with an A733, but it only uses eMMC as the primary boot device. Now I’ll try another one with an A523 and see if I have better luck there.

lostmsu• 2 months ago

8nm SoC. Sounds like it is extremely slow.

I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation

Related Stories