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- Hacker News
- Why tablet makers does not provide an easy way to run Debian 12 on their hardware?by igtztorrero
- That would take money and effort and they just want to make something that people will buy in volume.by m0llusk
- Not mainline Linux, if anyone wonders.by megous
- What was the motivation for this? Why this particular tablet?by amingilani
- 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.by tech4bot
- I love how easy AI makes it to hack devices that otherwise wouldn't be worth the time.by roger_
- 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.by theragra
- Agreed. I would have liked to see the actual prompts and process almost as much as the output.by yjftsjthsd-h
- 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.
by squarefoot - 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 speedby Evidlo
- 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-yoavmby non-nil
- I hope we get similar momentum for all cheap Android phones!by abyssin
- 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.
by regularfry - 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
by tech4bot - 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.
by cf100clunk - 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.
by tech4bot - I went on Aliexpress and I seem to be able to get it for 73 euro.by saghul
- After seeing the headline I immediately checked eBay and they are available to ship to the United States for $80 total.by cbdevidal
- 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...by bdcravens
- 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.by shrubble
- Are you doing this with https://opensimh.org/ ?by mikerg87
- 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)?by NoboruWataya
- Ahh yes, rely on AI to avoid learning how to do something. Our brains are cooked if we keep up these attitudes.by dakolli
- Here's a previous discussion about a 14 minute youtube video on reversing malware with AI and Ghidra.by ip_addr
- I have just released a online book on that, free of charge: https://github.com/DatanoiseTV/practical-reverse-engineeringby sylwester
- 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.
by marysol5 - You should try asking AI itself about itby pullshark91
- 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.
by realusername - 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.
by mewse-hn - 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.by tomaskafka