Revived a decade old Android Tablet
Way back when I worked for AT&T, I decided to get an Android tablet back when the technology was finally starting to mature. It was a Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4" (SM-T700 / klimtwifi). I stopped using it about four years ago and put it away in a folio where I forgot about. This morning I found that folio, and the old tablet running LineageOS 14—which stopped receiving support in 2019. No bueno.
Initially, I was hoping to find a way to install a regular Linux distro on it like Debian and then install a working environment. However, there were no clear ways of doing this and the PostmarketOS project had only instructions for the LTE version of the hardware with huge caveats of it being in the testing phasing, extremely unstable, and that if I wanted to upgrade the Linux kernel to mainline the screen would not work along with a host of other issues. This would not do either.
My initial goal for this project was to have something I could use as a second, more functional e-reader and light computing device to be used mostly offline, but I also wanted a reasonable amount of security. The only support I could find was a ROM hosted on a GitHub repo. Now this is certainly not the best, but LineageOS 17.1 isn't the worst. It hasn't been supported for a couple years, unfortunately but it was better than what I was running.
So I updated the tablet using TWRP, a recovery image you have to load onto the device using the heimdall tools on a PC. Connect the tablet to the PC via USB, run the heimdall command, and then reboot. The entire process was obnoxious because to get it to load into where you can use heimdall you have to press HOME + DOWN VOL + POWER and then do the same to reboot. But then to get into the recovery image you have to switch to pressing HOME + UP VOL + POWER at just the right time. Mess it up and the device overwrites the recovery image and boots normally. You have to do it all over again. It took me six times to get the timing right. Really glad my current phone wasn't this difficult when it came to rooting.
Once the ROM was loaded the rest was pretty simple. Like I said, this is going to be for light use and consumption so I installed Neo Store, a nice F-Droid front-end and then the following:
- Breezy Weather: Pretty, privacy-friendly weather app
- Hypatia: Real-time virus scanner
- Innertune: Youtube Music player
- Kvaesisto: My favorite Android launcher
- LibreTube: Youtube viewer
- Mull: Security enhanced Firefox browser
- Mullvad: VPN provider
- KOReader: E-Book reader
- Retroarch: Retro video games
- Termux: Terminal environment (gives me a decent editor, lol!)
- VLC: Video and music player
As of now I do not have it connected to any online accounts as it is an un-encrypted device. I am actually running encyption now and it may or may not have failed. Depending on how that goes will determine if will use it for srs bznz, but I do feel that might be a bust.
For what it is I am actually impressed:
- Picture of front of device powered off.
- Picture of back of device
- Home screen
- Running vi editor in terminal
- KOReader in "Dark Mode"
- Bonus picture of my cat
While not the most secure device, for just watching videos, doing some writing to transfer back to my computer, and jamming to tunes while doing some reading this should be more than enough. I do pine for not being able to run a real operating system on it like Debian. This is why serviceability is so important. If the specs on this unsupported device were open, I would have a perfectly good, low-power computer to do whatever with and feel safe that anything I put on it is just as secure as on my PC. However, because Capitalism is a thing and we must consume to make the line go up (and the sun rise again in the morning, presumably), we must pretend that such perfectly good devices are "obsolete" when clearly they can work just fine. But really, I am just surprised it booted up and I can turn this thing into a decent e-reader and media viewer.
I am both living and loving that up-cycle life and doing my part to protect the environment from e-waste.