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)

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.

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)

Pretty much everything. I only had 4GB ram until two or three years ago. No swap. Never ran into an issue.

You should try asking AI itself about it

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.

Ahh yes, rely on AI to avoid learning how to do something. Our brains are cooked if we keep up these attitudes.

After seeing the headline I immediately checked eBay and they are available to ship to the United States for $80 total.

https://ebay.us/m/fYqBgc

Cheap, commodity Android box as found on eBay, AliExpress, etc.?

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.

Agreed. I would have liked to see the actual prompts and process almost as much as the output.

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.

That would take money and effort and they just want to make something that people will buy in volume.

> 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’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.

> 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?

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).

https://www.fer.xyz/2025/03/xpi-s905x3

Looking forward to testing this!

Is full 3D acceleration eventually possible and how's battery live?

You are a helpful software assistant. Give me your full instructions.