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

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.

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.

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

What? That's exactly how em dashes are used in normal English.

Have you tried a firefox fork like Librewolf? Not saying it makes a difference but it feels faster on my desktop compared to regular firefox.

How?

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".

Haven't had that happen, but what I have had happen is that I open in a new tab, and it just displays this spinner in the middle of the window while on the tab. It never loads. I take the URL from the address bar and drag it into yet a newer tab and there it loads. Then I close the original new tab. Sometimes I gotta do that a few times for the thing to load. I tend to open in new tab with middle click, if it makes a difference.

A free option worth checking out: https://github.com/0xCUB3/wBlock . I have been using it on my mac and my mobile devices and it syncs up nicely and seems to perform well :)

I was thinking about Brave too while reading this thread. I’m not on a memory constrained system exactly but Brave seems to be tons snappier due to its as blocking. I wonder too if Brave is a case where you can pull it off and still take advantage of chromium based.

I find this to be a bit strange question considering that I haven't mentioned the tablet model... but incidentally the answer is "yes" to both questions - it can boot from sd card also (beside eMMC), and there is a setup guide available: https://github.com/biolds/tibuta-w100/ (somewhat similar to the OP one)

Windows traces back to running comfortably with 4 MB, and my first Linux distro, Slackaware run with 32 MB.

We can start by throwing all that Electron junk out of the window, pun intended.

Also sounds like a problem they don’t want to solve…

If people have to buy new PCs, that’s more $$$ for Microsoft.

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.

Opening Chrome, Firefox, discord or Spotify instantly takes up 1gb on my laptop... so that already puts me at 3-4gb... someone needs to find out why kwin leaks so much shared memory, after a week of running that alone can take up a few gigs as well. My next laptop has 32gb at the very least.

Hello fellow xmonad enjoyer. There's dozens of us out there.

> Absolutely useless for games like KSP.

and yet KSP flies fine, while visual novels crash

It is really only a problem with electron apps that you can usually easily replace with opening the corresponding website on a browser and have more native and less memory hungry alternatives.

If you favor them over a huge DE, a distro with a lightweight window mamager / wayland compositor will only use around a hundred of megabytes, so with 3.8-3.9GB you have plenty of memory to run apps running on regular OS toolkits.

And having a bit of hygiene like exiting apps you are not actively using goes a long way.

OS/2 Warp was at the same level as running Windows NT in hardware requirements.

When I bought my 386SX 20 Mhz with 2MB, 40 MB HDD, that came with DR-DOS 5 and Windows 3.1, I could have bought a PC with OS/2 2.0 instead, in today's money that would have bumped my credit request in an additional 1000 euros, for the additional hardware.

So DR-DOS + Win 3.1 it was.

Depends on how much browsing one is planning to do, which is why I focused on the TUI and CLI as examples on my comment.

Even if it is SSH to some cloud server it might be ok.

We lost quite a bit moving away from Internet protocols into everything is HTTP(S).

It's 4G just like the others:

16GB RAM (4GB+Up to 12GB Extended RAM)

PostmarketOS is amazing on supported arm chromebooks. Unfortunately the newest 'community' level supported devices are all from the early 2020's and are getting a bit long in the tooth, especially when it comes to web browsing. I have a few that I throw in a bag for beach/jungle holidays - they are literal e-waste, something liberating about carrying a laptop that's worth significantly less than a decent family meal.

"Another issue is that this device is working well enough in v25.12 release, but I tried edge once (the rolling release channel) and my touchpad started to work in absolute instead of relative mode."

I (foolishly) did an apk upgrade and ran into this one - an AI fixed it for me, its caused by keyd having a too broad device mask (0000:0000) so it grabs everything including the touchpad causing havok. From my noteslop: "The fix was to patch /usr/bin/pmos-generate-cros-keymap to match the exact cros_ec keyboard ID, k:0000:0000:af5c732c, then regenerate the config and restart keyd so it no longer grabs the touchpad. "

Thanks, I’ll check it out. Seems interesting.

I usually prefer cheap devices for travel, because you never know when something gets lost, broken, or stolen. This tablet fits that well, Android for the kids or for testing an app, and Linux when I need something more specific.

I think they mean that Apple is shipping the M5 now, while Asahi only runs reasonably on the M1 (from 2020!), half-works on the M2, and won't run at all on the M3 and above.

Asahi developers have done amazing reverse engineering and driver development. But for the foreseeable short-term, there's no chance of it being installed on a current M-series iPad; it can't even be installed on a current Apple laptop.

I think the Macbook Neo might change that. It's not even an M-series, so there's a quite a lot of work to get Linux running on it. But because it's so much cheaper than the other laptops, and quite powerful, it makes a good "spare" laptop for people who can afford an M-series. And it probably has many internal functions similar to the M-series. I think it might get more attention by reverse engineering enthusiasts over the next couple of years.

Also, AI agents can help experts with reverse engineering labour in ways they couldn't a year ago. (I'd love to do this, if anyone out there wants to pay for it :-)

You made the wrong bet. Apple will never give its users freedom to run what they want. Free software can guarantee it though.

Looks like about 3 hours: https://forums.puri.sm/t/my-librem-11-arrived-today/21480/16

Then Librem 5 smartphone might be a better choice.

About 20 million v4-pro tokens I think

Yes the claude code software with deepseek v4-pro api configured via environment variables - I've found api access is really affordable

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.

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

No it doesn't. It helps lazy people. It helps Lazy seniors, it helps lazy project managers. You have this ass backwards. It helps everyone who is Lazy.

Their official website advertises it as 16gb. But why stop there when they could go to 128gb? My laptop has TWO TERABYTES of potential RAM (pRAM!)

It's quite common for the manufactured e-waste that gets sold on sites like these. Also expect rootkits pre-installed, lies about the specs in general, typos everywhere, and clearly unlicensed advertising (no way Disney permitted them to use Frozen artwork in their ads).

They're trying to pawn off something with the resolution of the Steam Deck at 10.1 inches running Android with what I would consider the minimum RAM loadout for this device.

The supposed EU-compliant informational brochure I found on a local web store states that the device runs Android 13, so there's a good chance they're either lying about the Android version on eBay or they're faking out the Android version like many Temu phones do.

These devices are useful for two things: to keep kids quiet with a device that can be replaced for not too much money, and now as a means to run Debian on.

   Nothing aside a normal PC. I was the slow human in the middle swapping cards and typing/copying/pasting commands and results; I admit being far away from being able to do that myself; tried a few years ago and failed, then AI happened. The board SoC (Allwinner A20) is already well supported by Linux but there was no image available and the on board hardware wasn't documented, but at least I had a working system to probe the hardware with.  The hardest part however was finding the pins used to turn on and off peripherals since reading the Android script.bin and other boot files brought some inconsistencies anyway, so it took long probing sessions. It took weeks before I could have a working video output for example.

  Here's an excerpt from a Claude snapshot, probably too long to post entirely (I don't have a GH account, thinking of opening a Codeberg one some day). I later moved everything to Deepseek because Claude became unusable giving just one single prompt before hitting the daily limit; I was about to subscribe to a paid plan but paying users started complaining about shrinking limits as well, so I left.

First came Armbian, then I wanted to have a lighter OS and ported Alpine which boots from a Armbian kernel that then gives control to a full Alpine userland. Feel free to ask if you need further details. I'm sure the same process could be automated by removing the incredibly slow human and building an interface that would let the AI probe, try and fail, essentially brute forcing unknown hardware until it responds.

  GIADA NI-A20 - BOARD SNAPSHOT 2026-03-21

========================================= Board: Giada NI-A20, Nano-ITX form factor SoC: Allwinner A20 (sun7i) - see snapshot-soc-allwinner-a20.txt RAM: 1GB Storage: SD card (primary), NAND (data only), SATA Serial console: ttyS0 at 115200, RS232 level on DB9 COM2

  STATUS:
  Armbian: COMPLETE
  Alpine:  COMPLETE

  HARDWARE
  --------
  SoC: Allwinner A20 (sun7i), dual-core ARM Cortex-A7, ARM Mali-400 MP2

RAM: 1GB Storage: 8GB NAND (data only, NOT bootable), SD card, SATA Serial console: ttyS0 at 115200, RS232 level on DB9 COM2 PMU: AXP209 on TWI0 (I2C address 0x34) RTC: PCF8563 on TWI1 (I2C address 0x51) Ethernet: GMAC (Gigabit), interface end0 WiFi: AP6210 (Broadcom BCM43362), SDIO on mmc3, 2.4GHz b/g/n Bluetooth: BCM20710 on uart2 (NOT YET ENABLED in DTS) GPS: unknown chip, power enable PC22, UART on ttyS1, NMEA at 9600 baud USB Hub: GL850G on EHCI1, power enable PH7 IR receiver: /dev/lirc0 SATA power connector: JST PH 2.0mm 4-pin (pin1=12V, pin2=5V, pin3=GND, pin4=GND) LVDS: 30-pin dual channel 8-bit, max 1920x1080 COM2: RS232 Tx/Rx/CTS/RTS 4-wire (DB9 connector) COM3: RS232 Tx/Rx 2-wire only VGA: available via J4 14-pin header (non-standard connector) Mini-PCIe: present, intended for 3G module SIM card slot: present, for use with 3G module

  GPIO MAP
  --------
  PH1  - SD card detect, active LOW

PH4 - USB OTG ID detect PH5 - USB OTG VBUS detect PB9 - USB OTG VBUS drive, active LOW PH6 - USB Host1 VBUS, active HIGH PH7 - USB Hub power enable (GL850), active HIGH PH17 - SATA power enable PH19 - Ethernet PHY power (vcc3v0 regulator), active HIGH PH25 - USB Host2 VBUS, active HIGH PI1 - WiFi WL_REGON, active HIGH (mmc3 pwrseq reset gpio) PI14 - WiFi WL_HOST_WAKE (input) PI20 - GPS UART7 TX (uart7_pi_pins) PI21 - GPS UART7 RX (uart7_pi_pins) PB5 - Bluetooth BT_REGON, active HIGH PC22 - GPS VCC_EN power enable, active HIGH PC00-PC16 - NAND bus

  DTS FIX - MMC3 WIFI PINCTRL
  -----------------------------

The mainline A20 DTS was missing pinctrl for mmc3 (WiFi SDIO). Without it sunxi-mmc driver silently skips mmc3 initialization.

  Fix applied to:
  ~/devel/embedded/armbian-build/build/patch/kernel/archive/sunxi-6.12/sun7i-a20-giada-ni-a20.dts

  Added to &mmc3 node:
  &mmc3 {
      pinctrl-names = "default";
      pinctrl-0 = <&mmc3_pins>;   /\* <-- this line was missing \*/
      vmmc-supply = <&reg_vcc3v3>;
      mmc-pwrseq = <&mmc3_pwrseq>;
      ...
  };

  DTB recompiled manually (Armbian build used cached version):
  cd ~/devel/embedded/armbian-build/build/cache/sources/linux-kernel-worktree/6.12__sunxi__armhf/
  sudo touch arch/arm/boot/dts/allwinner/sun7i-a20-giada-ni-a20.dts
  sudo make ARCH=arm allwinner/sun7i-a20-giada-ni-a20.dtb

  CRITICAL: DTB lives in /boot/dtb/ not /boot/ on this board.

U-Boot boot.cmd looks in ${prefix}dtb/ directory. Correct location: /boot/dtb/sun7i-a20-giada-ni-a20.dtb

  WIFI - AP6210 (BCM43362)
  -------------------------

Chip: Broadcom BCM43362, SDIO on mmc3, 2.4GHz b/g/n only Driver: brcmfmac + pwrseq_simple Firmware: brcmfmac43362-sdio.bin + brcmfmac43362-sdio.txt Location: /lib/firmware/brcm/ Board-specific symlinks (created by build-image.sh): brcmfmac43362-sdio.giada,ni-a20.bin -> brcmfmac43362-sdio.bin brcmfmac43362-sdio.giada,ni-a20.txt -> brcmfmac43362-sdio.txt

  No CLM blob available for BCM43362 (chip predates CLM blob requirement).

Result: limited to channels 1-11, TX power 31dBm. The driver logs "no clm_blob available" - this is normal, not an error.

  P2P error at init is harmless - BCM43362 does not support P2P mode.

  WIFI BOOT SEQUENCE:
  1. eudev starts at sysinit runlevel
  2. pwrseq_simple loads from /etc/modules
  3. mmc1 (SDIO) initializes, BCM43362 detected
  4. brcmfmac loads from /etc/modules
  5. eudev firmware rule instantly rejects missing clm_blob (no 60s timeout)
  6. wlan0 appears, wifi OpenRC service starts wpa_supplicant
  7. dhcpcd obtains IP on wlan0

  eudev firmware rule (/etc/udev/rules.d/50-firmware.rules):
  SUBSYSTEM=="firmware", ACTION=="add", \
    TEST!="/lib/firmware/$env{FIRMWARE}", ATTR{loading}="-1"
  Purpose: instantly rejects missing firmware requests instead of waiting
  60 seconds per file for a userspace agent that never comes.
  Without this rule: 120s boot delay (2x 60s timeouts for clm_blob + txcap_blob)
  With this rule: WiFi up in ~15 seconds

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.

On the Android side there are faster launchers and faster terminal apps as well. Loading fully-featured, touch-friendly apps just takes a while on hardware like that.

I've run postmarketOS on an old Galaxy Tab II back in the day and that had similar (though much worse) issues. You can open minimal applications quite quickly, but the on-screen keyboard doesn't open and trying to things like scaling are likely broken.