I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation
github.com187 points by tech4bot 8 hours ago
187 points by tech4bot 8 hours 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.
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.
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.
>[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…
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
Try the "Auto tab discard" extension. It allows me to have hundreds of tabs "open" and (in combination with Tree Style Tabs) largely blur the line between "browser sessions" and "bookmarks".
Far better than bookmarks.
Bookmarks do not store click history, the trajectory you took to arrive at the page. With tabs, the contexts is a backbutton away.
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.
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)
Pretty much everything. I only had 4GB ram until two or three years ago. No swap. Never ran into an issue.
>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.
Also sounds like a problem they don’t want to solve…
If people have to buy new PCs, that’s more $$$ for Microsoft.
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.
Same here still use my laptop with 8GB DDR4 with Manjaro running.
Since I have a desktop I do use rustdesk way more often to just boot into that.
Y’all are embarrassing me with Lubuntu and Chrome on a 2013 Dell with 16GB and an SSD. Not fast enough for all I need to do but covers 80% of my needs. It’s my road laptop and the home desktop handles the rest.
But you’re doing much better than me.
Mine is a 2012 mac book air, I've replaced the battery early this year, and last month I upgraded the ssd to 1tb. I expect this computer will be a family heirloom after the apocalypse.
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)
> 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.
> Absolutely useless for games like KSP.
and yet KSP flies fine, while visual novels crash
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?
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)?
Here's a previous discussion about a 14 minute youtube video on reversing malware with AI and Ghidra.
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.
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.
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.
I will then, didn't know it would be interesting for other people.
As for PostmarketOS, I've built my own tooling scripts around it to make it easier to build patches, debug hex variables, switch between downstream/mainline and rebuilding everything with a single command. (Unrelased yet though).
I find their tooling okay for a release for end-users but a bit clunky for debugging.
Sounds great! Would you be so kind to send me an E-Mail once you wrote the article?
My address is my username @ism.rocks
Alternatively, if you released the article on your blog, I could just follow the RSS feed.
Ahh yes, rely on AI to avoid learning how to do something. Our brains are cooked if we keep up these attitudes.
All you do is go around the site complaining about AI. Someone porting Linux to ewaste is valuable, AI helped… go touch grass
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.
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.
I applaude this. Ideally I look to make my own TRMNL-alike device, but at 478g (1.05 lbs) the U10 seems to me too heavy to put on the fridge.
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.
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.
After seeing the headline I immediately checked eBay and they are available to ship to the United States for $80 total.
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.
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.
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
I love how easy AI makes it to hack devices that otherwise wouldn't be worth the time.
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.
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?
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.
Agreed. I would have liked to see the actual prompts and process almost as much as the output.
What was the motivation for this? Why this particular tablet?
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.
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.
I got it from Amazon DE. The listing said it had an RK3562. There are a few different listings with Android 13/14/15/16. I only bought two, one with Android 15 and one with Android 16, and both turned out to be the same hardware.
Can you post the Amazon DE links? Because none of the listings I see specify that processor.
Would like to try this out, but getting an incompatible machine would be a real bummer.
Edit: OK, I think the Android 15 is this one: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/DOOGEE-U10-Tablet-WiFi-128GB/dp/B... (Nov/Dec delivery)
I also saw the Android 13 version, but I haven’t tested that one, so I don’t know which hardware revision it uses.
On the units I tested, the board says: RK3562-v1.0 2024.06.28.
This is the listing I used, but it is currently out of stock:
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...
Not mainline Linux, if anyone wonders.
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.
You can run any distro on Termux thru QEMU or Docker, even Windows, with a RDP client.
Why tablet makers does not provide an easy way to run Debian 12 on their hardware?
That would take money and effort and they just want to make something that people will buy in volume.
Why is Android so slow?
It's interesting how everything is a "workstation" these day.
Yes, workstation is a bit exaggerated. But it is still more useful to me than stock Android on this hardware.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
Show HN is (or was) one of my favorite parts of this site. I read a lot of submitted projects.
The people who don’t even take 30 seconds to write their own comments aren’t here to share their knowledge or discuss the project. It’s self-advertising. They might be following instructions from the LLM to post it here. There was a project a couple days ago that still had the AI-generated marketing plan in git which instructed the person to post it here and then on some subreddits, including marketing copy to include.
The projects often don’t work, too. Remember the guy who claimed to have uncovered a multi billion dollar Meta influence campaign? When I read the documents they had output from Claude saying that it failed to access the documents, but then it guessed what the document might include. The whole report was full of this, but it was posted here and upvoted as if someone had done deep research.
This OP hasn't done any of those things. They are here discussing the project, and it's clear all of their replies are human-written. The AI use is stated up front in the readme. They posted a 12 minute YouTube video demonstrating that the project works, with narration that indicates English is not their first language. The git commit messages are all classic short human messages. It's a genuinely neat project that obviously has no commercial motivation. Their crime appears to be using AI to clean up their non-native English in the README and then reusing some of that README text in the top-level descriptive comment on their Show HN post. Indeed, they should not have done that for their comment, but the rest of these accusations are just soapboxing about AI. You could have written this comment anywhere; it has nothing to do with this post.
> and it's clear all of their replies are human-written. The AI use is stated up front in the readme. The
Very much not the case with the comment I responded to.
There is a stark contrast between the AI written first comment and some of their other comments.
I know many here don’t like any accusations of AI writing because they aren’t as attuned to picking it up, but the comment I responded to was as blatant as it gets.
I tried to give a more friendly encouragement to share self-written comments.
I'm not willing to give the benefit of the doubt to AI generated submissions anymore because the technical merit has too often turned out to be false, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471647
Yes, I used AI to help with the README and wording. But the project itself came from actual testing: opening the device, wiring UART, reading logs, understanding the boot flow, adapting the DTB, and debugging hardware issues.
For Wi-Fi, I even contacted the chip factory. They didn’t answer at first, so I wrote again in Chinese with AI’s help and eventually got the drivers.
We are not yet at the point where you give AI a tablet and it magically returns a working image. AI helped a lot, but it also introduced bugs more than once. The real work was still testing, breaking things, fixing them, and repeating.
I posted it here because I think the project is useful and could attract people who want to build on it. All the devices should be more open, repairable, and reusable, so we can actually own the hardware we buy.
> 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.
What? That's exactly how em dashes are used in normal English.
An em dash is used without spaces in most typography manuals. But that’s for typeset books, it’s not like everybody writes that way in casual communication.
I think surrounding it with spaces comes from people using a regular dash (the em dash is not readily accessible on the keyboard), then surrounding it with spaces to make sure it’s not interpreted as a dash.
I use (or used to) mdash with spaces, I've always just found the mdash when it collides with the words to be ugly.
I've read a few typography related books and checked some style manuals in my time, but no-one has ever 'corrected' my usage so I think it's alright.
I was listening to a podcast recently that had interesting information about the birth of mdash - "99% Invisible: The Em Dash".
Episode webpage: https://99percentinvisible.org/?p=46542. (Antenna Pod is a great podcast player!)
The comment is good info though, what help is this reply? Why are you not watching for quality of what’s said?
I'm happy to see your comment not getting nuked. Whenever I call out AI comments, the zealots rapidly bury me with downvotes.
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.
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 :)
> 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?
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.
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).
Does that advertised "expandable RAM" also work on Debian? I assume that's just a fancy name for swap, right?
Looking forward to testing this!
Is full 3D acceleration eventually possible and how's battery live?