Repurposing Dodgy Android TV Boxes As Linux Boxes

November 3, 2025 by Maya Posch 46 Comments

Marketplaces and e-waste recycling centers are practically overflowing with the things: ARM-based streaming TV boxes that run some — usually very outdated and compromised — version of Android. While you can use them for their promised streaming purposes, they’re invariably poorly optimized and often lie about their true hardware specifications. Which leaves the most important question: can you install Linux on these SBCs and use them as a poor man’s Raspberry Pi alternative? The answer, according to [Oleksii’s Tech] on YouTube is ‘sorta’.

The fake H313 TV box SBC in all its glory. (Credit: Oleksii's Tech, YouTube) — The fake H313 TV box SBC in all its glory. (Credit: Oleksii’s Tech, YouTube)

The commonly seen X96Q clone Android TV box that [Oleksii] bought for $10 is a good example. The clone advertises itself as based on a quad-core Cortex-A53 AllWinner H313 SoC, like the genuine X96Q, but actually has a Rockchip RK3229 inside with correspondingly far lower performance. After you have determined what the actual hardware inside the box is, you can get a copy of Armbian for that particular SoC. Here, the Rk322x-box minimal image was used, with the box booting straight off an SD card. Some Android TV boxes require much more complicated methods to even boot off external media, so this was a lucky break.

Continuing the hardware scam, it was advertised as having 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of Flash, but it actually has just 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of eMMC Flash. This was enough to get Armbian desktop up and running, but that’s about all you can do. Desktop application performance was atrocious, mostly due to the CPU’s quad Cortex-A7 cores struggling to keep up.

As also suggested in the comments, the best use for these low-spec SBCs is probably to run light server applications on them, including Pi-Hole, Samba, an IRC bouncer, and so on. They’re pretty low-power, often have the requisite Ethernet built in, and it keeps another bit of potential e-waste from getting scrapped.

Continue reading “Repurposing Dodgy Android TV Boxes As Linux Boxes” →

Open Source Hack Lets The Razer Nari Headset Work With Linux

October 21, 2025 by Lewin Day 20 Comments

The Razer Nari is a decent wireless headset, but it’s a little oddball—because it uses a bespoke USB dongle for pairing. This is all well and good if you’re using a supported configuration; plug it into a Windows PC, run the utility, and you’re good to go. If you’re a Linux user, though, you were out of luck—but [JJ] has just solved that problem.

The tool was created by reverse engineering the pairing protocol used by Razer’s own proprietary software. [JJ] figured out the necessary pairing command, and how to send it to both the dongle and the headset. The headset itself must be connected by a USB cable when initiating the pairing process.

[JJ] believes the tool should work with any Razer Nari and dongle variant. However, the Nari Ultimate and Nari Essential models are yet to be tested, with verification still required. However, the pairing commands were extracted from Razer’s own tool and don’t appear to differ so it should probably work across the board. Setup is still a little fussy, particularly to get both the Game Audio and Chat Audio outputs working under Linux. However, [JJ] has helpfully provided the necessary detail to get everything up and running with PulseAudio and PipeWire setups.

Proprietary hardware can be frustrating to work with at times, but that’s never stopped hackers from reverse engineering their way to success before. If you’ve got your own projects in this vein, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

Ask Hackaday: How Do You Distro Hop?

September 29, 2025 by Al Williams 36 Comments

If you read “Jenny’s Daily Drivers” or “Linux Fu” here on Hackaday, you know we like Linux. Jenny’s series, especially, always points out things I want to try on different distributions. However, I have a real tendency not to change my distro, especially on my main computer. Yet I know people “distro hop” all the time. My question to you? How do you do it?

The Easy but Often Wrong Answer

Sure, there’s an easy answer. Keep your /home directory on a separate disk and just use it with a new boot image. Sounds easy. But the truth is, it isn’t that easy. I suppose if you don’t do much with your system, that might work. But even if you don’t customize things at the root level, you still have problems if you change desktop environments or even versions of desktop environments. Configuration files change over time. Good luck if you want to switch to and from distros that are philosophically different, like systemd vs old-school init; apparmor vs SELinux. So it isn’t always as simple as just pointing a new distro at your home directory.

One thing I’ve done to try out new things is to use a virtual machine. That’s easy these days. But it isn’t satisfying if your goal is to really switch to a new distro as your daily driver. Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: How Do You Distro Hop?” →

Mini Laptop Needs Custom Kernel

September 29, 2025 by Al Williams 12 Comments

These days, you rarely have to build your own Linux kernel. You just take what your distribution ships, and it usually works just fine. However, [Andrei] became enamored with a friend’s cyberdeck and decided that he’d prefer to travel with a very small laptop. The problem is, it didn’t work well with a stock kernel. So, time to build the kernel again.

Of course, he tried to simply install Linux. The installer showed a blank screen. You might guess that you need to add ‘nomodeset’ to the kernel options. But the screen was still a bit wacky. [Andrei] likens troubleshooting problems like this to peeling an onion. There are many layers to peel back, and you are probably going to shed some tears.

Continue reading “Mini Laptop Needs Custom Kernel” →

BCacheFS Is Now A DKMS Module After Exile From The Linux Kernel

September 19, 2025 by Maya Posch 47 Comments

It’s been a tense few months for users of the BCacheFS filesystem, as amidst the occasional terse arguments and flowery self-praise on the Linux Kernel mailing list the future of this filesystem within the Linux kernel hung very much in the balance. After some initial confusion about what ‘externally maintained’ means in Linux parlance, it’s now clear that this means that BCacheFS has effectively been kicked out of the kernel as [Linus] promised and will ship as a DKMS module instead. The gory details of this change are discussed in a recent video by [Brodie Robertson].

We covered the BCacheFS controversy in the Linux world a few months ago, amidst reports of data loss and filesystem corruption among its users. Its lead developer, [Kent Overstreet], came to blows with [Linus Torvalds] on the LKML after [Kent] insisted on repeatedly pushing new features into kernel release candidate branches along with rather haughty statements on why he should be able to do this.

To make a long story short, [Linus] didn’t like this and froze BCacheFS support in the current kernel release with all future in-kernel development ceased. Distributions like SuSE have initially said that will disable BCacheFS starting in kernel version 6.17, meaning that users of BCacheFS may now have to install the DKMS module themselves. Some distributions like Arch are likely to include this DKMS module by default, which is something you want to check if you use this filesystem.

Continue reading “BCacheFS Is Now A DKMS Module After Exile From The Linux Kernel” →

Everything In A Linux Terminal

September 10, 2025 by Al Williams 51 Comments

Here at Hackaday Central, we fancy that we know a little something about Linux. But if you’d tasked us to run any GUI program inside a Linux terminal, we’d have said that wasn’t possible. But, it turns out, you should have asked [mmulet] who put together term.everything.

You might be thinking that of course, you can launch a GUI program from a terminal. Sure. That’s not what this is. Instead, it hijacks the Wayland protocol and renders the graphics as text. Or, if your terminal supports it, as an image. Performance is probably not your goal if you want to do this. As the old saying goes, “It’s not that the dog can sing well; it’s that the dog can sing at all.”

If, like us, you are more interested in how it works, there’s a write up explaining the nuances of the Wayland protocol. The article points out that Wayland doesn’t actually care what you do with the graphical output. In particular, “… you could print out the graphics and give them to a league of crochet grandmas to individually tie together every single pixel into the afghan of legend!” We expect to see this tested at an upcoming hacker conference. Maybe even Supercon.

We generally don’t like Wayland very much. We use a lot of hacks like xdotool and autokey that Wayland doesn’t like. We also think people didn’t understand X11’s network abilities until it was too late. If you think of it as only a video card driver, then you get what you deserve. But we have to admit, we are humbled by term.everything.

A Look At Not An Android Emulator

September 10, 2025 by Fenix Guthrie 15 Comments

Recently, Linux has been rising in desktop popularity in no small part to the work on WINE and Proton. But for some, the year of the Linux desktop is not enough, and the goal is now for the year of the Linux phone. To that end, an Android Linux translation layer called Android Translation Layer (we never said developers were good at naming) has emerged for those running Linux on their phones.

Android Translation Layer (ATL) is still in very early days, and likely as not, remains unpackaged on your distro of choice. Fortunately, a workaround is running an Alpine Linux container with graphics pass through via a tool like Distrobox or Toolbox. Because of the Alpine derived mobile distribution postmarketOS, ATL is packaged in the Alpine repos.

In many ways, running Android apps on Linux is much easier then Windows apps. Because Android apps are architecture independent, hardware emulation is unnecessary. With such similar kernels, on paper at least, Android software should run with minimal effort on Linux. Most of what ATL provides is a Linux/Android hardware abstraction layer glue to ensure Android system calls make their way to the Linux kernel.

Of course, there is a lot more to running Android apps, and the team is working to implement the countless Android system APIs in ATL. For now, older Android apps such as Angry Birds have the best support. Much like WINE, ATL will likely devolve into a game of wack-a-mole where developers implement fresh translation code as new APIs emerge and app updates break. Still, WINE is a wildly successful project, and we hope to see ATL grow likewise!

If you want to get your Android phone to talk to Linux, make sure to check out this hack next!