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

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

#131

Post by ZeWaka »

dakolli wrote: post #120
exe34 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I prefer not letting my brain rot. You do you though.

I don't need to learn every single linux cli tool flag in existence, it's not going to actually improve my life materially.

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

#133

Post by exhilaration »

exe34 wrote: post #88
cbdevidal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm curious, how much to replace the battery? I bought my kid a used 2015 MacBook Air like 5 years ago and it needs a new battery, otherwise it's totally fine.

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

#134

Post by mewse-hn »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #14

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)?

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

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

#135

Post by [deleted] »

roryirvine wrote: post #52
nine_k wrote: post #23

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…

[deleted]

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

#137

Post by Nezk »

nine_k wrote: post #23

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.

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.

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

#138

Post by tnelsond4 »

nine_k wrote: post #23

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.

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

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

#139

Post by laughing_man »

nine_k wrote: post #23

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.

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.

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

#140

Post by bnabholz »

tech4bot wrote: post #2

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 ca…

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?
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