Host a website from an old phone using postmarketOS
42 points by louismerlin
42 points by louismerlin
I appreciate this. It shows the process is really quite simple, and I hope lots of people consider the possibilities of devices they currently have in a box or drawer.
One concern I have: how is it keeping a device like this plugged in for an extended period? Is it fairly easy to set a charge limit so the battery is kept at, say, 50% or 80% or whatever? Does it not matter as much as I think it does with modern battery management and cell chemistries?
Another option that might help people is to recycle an old Chromebook (perhaps purchased for a student).
In most (nearly all?) cases, older Chromebooks can have the BIOS re-flashed, and then you can install a standard Linux distro.
It isn't uncommon for old devices to have 4GB of RAM, and it is still an advantage to be running an standard amd64 processor.
Thank you for your comment!
I agree it’s quite simple, but quite simple for the technically savvy (until one of us decides to write a drag-and-drop app that does all of the above).
The battery support for the particular phone I am using is actually broken in postmarketOS, so I have not been able to monitor its health over the past months. But you raise a good point, I will have to dig into it at some point.
I've been thinking about repurposing an old Samsung S8 to a proper NAS; but you'd likely be stuck with USB OTG for actual disk space so... that would be only fine for data you care little about
I did this briefly with an XMPP server until I finally got some hardware.
But can it run Kubernetes? (I’m not sure if I’m joking or serious)
I like to see projects like these that make use of hardware that would otherwise likely get landfilled.
I wish I understood the Android ecosystem better. While I know all the "open"ness of the ecosystem was completely oversold, what I don't get is how all the different hardware of each model of phone doesn't just have, say, kernel modules that can be loaded across different kernels. Why doesn't the hardware support that's already in the Android OS that most of these phones come with mean that the hardware's already got support in other Linux / Android versions?
You can also do virtualization on most smartphones