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.

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.

Maybe it could boot NetBSD

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

- 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.

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

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.