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Anonymous09/25/25, 14:00No.2946936DIY Reviving Old Tech
Absolutely NOT a "tech guy". 45y/o tradeworker, left off at DOS & Qbasic in '93. Found some 2016 tech during eviction remodel: 2016 Galaxy Tab-A and 2016 HP Stream 11. Do not be fooled; all the "tekkie lingo", specs and processes I will be citing are new to me, learned over the course of these projects. I knew absolutely fuck-all about it before I started.
SM-T580 tablet has 2gb ram. when found, it was running Android Oreo. slow as shit and no storage space for anything. I could surf the web and shitpost on Chan, but had no space for memes, Pepes and/or videos. did lots of research and relied on Grok for a fair amount of process. that said, NOTHING was easy aboot this... for me. I found the tablet and craptop last December. tablet has been in a bedside table since it had
no storage and was too slow to be of practical use. I will try to outline the entire 2 day ordeal (15 fucking hours) as succinct and condensed as possible.
I found a 32GB micro SDHC card while tearing oot the carpet & padding in a remodel. my first thought was "COOL! I can double the eMMC storage on my Linux Stream Craptop!" however, after a quick discussion with Grok, I decided my first use of it would be to flash a new OS onto the Samsung Tablet. did a little research into available OS options and learned aboot the basic hardware/software that operates little phones, tablets, etc. quite different from "regular" computers, it turns oot. Decided on "LineageOS" for what is essentially a clone of Android 13 but with full current patch and security support. I found the Lineage file on some website, perhaps Github, unsure exactly where. I was also told that I needed to I stall "MindTheGapps" to access Google app store and run anything other than basic web browser on it. I started my questionable journey at 8:00 Saturday morning. I wrote the aforementioned files onto SD then connected tablet to craptop via USB data cable, which I used to install something called TWRP by "TeamWin".
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Anon09/25/25, 14:07No.2946937
>2016 Galaxy Tab-A
these are worthless, they are out of date and barely work. I had a pair my kids used as tablets up until last year and I wound up throwing them away (fuck you mother earth). I have neighbors with young kids but the tech headache of keeping these going wasn't worth saddling them with outdated system and hardware. I saw them going for $100 used at the time and I can't imagine they were selling for that but many such listings.
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Anon09/25/25, 14:16No.2946941
TWRP is required to enter some mode that allows removal of old OS & data and the installation of new OS and the Google app store "bridge" program "Gapps". this is when my (literal) headache began. i wiped, fashed, and rebooted this thing for hours. kept getting various installation errors. by 20:00 all I had managed was to get a stalled soft-brick screen with a blue "frown" logo with a blue 'O' moving across it. finally, had to take a sumitriptan (migraine abortive) and call it a night. I had pretty much given up. the next morning, after a bit more dead-end Ouroboros action, Grok suggested a full format and exFAT swap in addition to the wipe. FINALLY I was able to successfully install Lineage20 OS. "Gapps" continued to fail. at long last, I was able to at least get the fucking thing to boot up and it did, indeed, function as a browser. great, but useless outside of surfing. After several hours and multiple conflicting suggestions of "MindTheGapps" arm64 vs arm(32) file installations (for the record i DID need the arm64), Grok finally suggested that perhaps the files were simply too large for my pathetic little tablet. It directed me to hunt down NikGapps-arm64-core, a much smaller version of the same program. FUCKING HELL!! it worked on the first try. BOOM! I now have an awesome & fully functional tablet, that I don't even need. it was 15:00 on Sunday, FOR FUCK'S SAKE!I do enjoy it now. it's nice for couch and bed browsing on The Chan. easier on the eyes than my little Galaxy Note 20 phone screen.
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Anon09/25/25, 18:00No.2946991
My little HP Linux Mint XFCE craptop is a similar story. I actually found it in the same eviction/remodel as the tablet. was passcode protected, but the lockscreen wallpaper had a giveaway password clue: "Last name 13". password was literally the evicted's last name + the number 13.at that point (December 2024) I knew exactly Ø aboot modern computers, software, or coding. I tried to just use it as-was with the factory-installed Windows 10. it was totally unusable. could not update due to storage constraints (<2GB available) and it would take up to 2 minutes to load/view a 4MB image on Chan.I knew aboot Linux from my childhood nerd days of Basic programming. I had never used it or even seen it, but I knew the older, better computer nerds gravitated to it. Anon from /g/ suggested Linux Mint XFCE. I dug around the ol' junk drawer and found a 32GB USB stick from the wife's old job. I found the XFCE file somewhere, downloaded it and probably some other bootloader crap, and after a bit of frustration & fucking with it, got it to install, boot and have been learning Linux & Terminal command ever since. Now it has 15GB eMMC available + the 32GB SDHC mentioned in the Galaxy Tab-A story above.My XFCE craptop is now my daily driver. I don't touch my wife's $3k Mac because I am notoriously hard on equipment. if I fuck up my Craptop or spill coffee on it, little is lost. it's main purpose is tracking my dairy sheep pedigrees and shitposting on 4Chan.2 months later, the battery failed & bloated. I got another one for FOR FREE from Amazon Vine. watched a few how-to videos on installation an voila: new life!total cash investments on these projects: Ø.00if I ever find the motivation & time I might consider learning Python or some other useful language, but as it stands now, I have more tech than I need as a Farmer/Rancher/Tradeworker.
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Anon09/25/25, 22:55No.2947039
You can pick up i5 thinkcentre m900 for next to nothing and have a reliable daily driver if you ever need a real pc op. I have two one with windows and one running mint XFCE. They can take regular sata ssds which can get up to pretty high capacity for memes. I even ran a wow private server off one of them. Better than using a raspberry pi.
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Anon09/26/25, 12:35No.2947111
>thanks to grok even a moron tradie can navigate the complex world of custom roms without bricking his device multiple times
so this is the power of ai
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Anon09/29/25, 02:07No.2947682
Cool thread
For me the hardest part was unlocking the bootloader
Had to jump through hoops for unlocking xiaomi bootloaders.
You don't need gapps. Google has turned into shitshow.
Just install from free repos fdroid etc or plain apk files
Banking software wont work anyways or mostly will be unstable
I'm currently set to building lineageos for my own. Anyone experienced?
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Anon10/03/25, 16:50No.2948542
weekend bump. anyone doing any DIY-worthy nerd shit over the next 2.5 days?
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Anon10/04/25, 02:17No.2948650
OP, the other advantage of flashing a custom rom is, that you don't have to buy expensive phones(like your note 20). Buy a cheap <200$ xiaomi and install custom roms(like lineage) on it. Do note that not every phone has easily available custom roms or has a bootloader that's easily unlockable. When buying a new phone you would have to do some research on the availability of custom roms for the phone you are eyeing. As a general rule of thumb, the more popular a phone is globally, the higher the chances are, that someone's made a custom rom for it.Also, you don't have to replace your phone every 2-3 years like how an average consumer does. i've been using mine for about 4 years now, and plan to use it for a decade. (unless i break it somehow or lose it). Your note 20 should have a bunch of custom roms available for it, so you could probably use it till you run it into ground.
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Anon10/07/25, 20:24No.2949454
Similar story here. Found an ancient 3070 GPU on eBay for chump change and have just extended my windows desktop lifespan for at least another 2 years. Don't know why everyone buys the latest gear when it's out of date quicker than a mexican can eat a taco
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Anon10/19/25, 01:19No.2951643
Today I experimented repairing my Samsung Galaxy S9's screen (I needed to change GLASS only, but not the oled).Since I knew it was gonna be hard, I installed lineageOS, activated USB Debugging and downloaded scrcpy on my pc.Everything started fine but went downhill fast, as I tore my oled while separating the glass.The screen doesn't work, but the phone is super fine and will now serve as a Raspberry Pi replacement with termux, probably will use it to install Klipper for my 3D Printer.
