LALaurensBER·Oct 15, 2022
It's such a shame that there isn't a larger community around reusing/recycling these old phones. Most of the recentish phones contain hardware that performs far better than e.g a Rasberry Pi (plus a screen, camera and built-in UPS) and they are far easier to find than a Rasberry Pi.
With a bit of tinkering one can run a "full" Linux distribution on Android phones (although hardware acceleration is a bit wonky and definitely not plug and play) and due to the size, Wifi, 3G/4G and battery they make excellent little servers. I have an older phone running as an ARM server with a 10 buck/month sim-card with unlimited data. Unless my house burns down or it crashes it should get a fairly good uptime. Getting a dedicated server with UPS and a 4G modem would be far more expensive and worse for the environment!
Here's some links to help you get sta
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rted (from my personal notes):
## Running Linux
- [Installation & Usage - udroid wiki](https://udroid-rc.gitbook.io/udroid-wiki/udroid-landing/quic...)
- [Get Started - Andronix Documentation](https://docs.andronix.app/)
- [Running Debian Linux on Android device natively | by The Quantified VC | Medium](https://medium.com/@quantvc/running-debian-on-android-device...)
- [GitHub - adi1090x/termux-desktop: Setup A Beautiful Desktop/GUI In Termux](https://github.com/adi1090x/termux-desktop)
- [Graphical Environment - Termux Wiki](https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Graphical_Environment)
- [GitHub - RandomCoderOrg/ubuntu-on-android: Run Ubuntu with pre-installed Desktop Environments in android/termux with ease! Everything is preinstalled so just download install and done](https://github.com/RandomCoderOrg/ubuntu-on-android)
### Hardware acceleration
- [GitHub - termux/termux-x11: Termux X11 add-on application. Still in early development.](https://github.com/termux/termux-x11)
- [Termux GPU Hardware Acceleration Tutorial | Ivon's Blog](https://ivonblog.com/en-us/posts/termux-compile-mesa-driver/)
- [How to use Termux X11 - The XWayand server on Android phone | Ivon's Blog](https://ivonblog.com/en-us/posts/termux-x11/)
### Docker
- [Install Docker on Termux · GitHub](https://gist.github.com/oofnikj/e79aef095cd08756f7f26ed24435...)
- [Package request: Docker engine · Issue #60 · termux/termux-root-packages · GitHub](https://github.com/termux/termux-root-packages/issues/60)
- [This tutorial shows how to run docker natively on Android, without VMs and chroot. · GitHub](https://gist.github.com/FreddieOliveira/efe850df7ff3951cb62d...)
It's also very easy to hookup a Bluetooth controller + [cheap dock](https://aliexpress.com/item/1005003527044516.html?algo_exp_i...) (not supported on all models but Samsung, Motorola and Huawei do usually have pretty good support) and use them for emulation purposes as well.
How capable? An Samsung Galaxy S9 (from 2019) will be able to emulate the following systems:
- Gamecube (up-scaling in light games)
- PS2 (fractional (e.g 1.5x) up-scaling in light/medium games)
- PSP (up-scaling in most games)
- Dreamcast (up-scaling in most games)
- PSX (up-scaling in all games)
- N64 (up-scaling in all games)
IMHO a far better solution (both from a cost and environmental perspective) than a Playstation or SNES Mini console.
Added bonus is the lower power consumption that it's very easy to take with you if you're travelling :)