Hi guys!
I'm a software developer for some years now, and today I got a request if I could hack any tablet/phone to use it like a raspberry pi or something similar. Basically, the question is, if I can install & run whatever I want on it, like it's the case on the raspberry pi.
I don't fully understand the differences between a raspberry pi-like SoC with an attached touchscreen and an android phone/tablet, so I'm very interested in this topic.
Would you maybe be so kind and answer me some basic questions?
- Is it possible to extract the drivers, for example for the GPU or the touch screen, from a rooted device? If yes, is it hard? Is it always the same, or a completely different process for every different GPU/tochscreen etc?
- Is it possible to use those drivers with the normal linux kernel & any distro I like to use?
- In order to swap android with my linux distribution of choice, what will I actually need to replace, or to do in general? I know that a typical android phone/tablet's internal storage is usually formatted with different partitions, like the bootloader, system oder data partition,
- Will I need to reformat the internal storage and even install a different bootloader? Or is the preinstalled bootloader usually able to boot any system, not just android?
Of course you don't have to answer all the questions. I'm grateful for any answer that helps me in one of those questions or provides me some information I might want to know in this topic.
Thank you very much :)
I'm a software developer for some years now, and today I got a request if I could hack any tablet/phone to use it like a raspberry pi or something similar. Basically, the question is, if I can install & run whatever I want on it, like it's the case on the raspberry pi.
I don't fully understand the differences between a raspberry pi-like SoC with an attached touchscreen and an android phone/tablet, so I'm very interested in this topic.
Would you maybe be so kind and answer me some basic questions?
- Is it possible to extract the drivers, for example for the GPU or the touch screen, from a rooted device? If yes, is it hard? Is it always the same, or a completely different process for every different GPU/tochscreen etc?
- Is it possible to use those drivers with the normal linux kernel & any distro I like to use?
- In order to swap android with my linux distribution of choice, what will I actually need to replace, or to do in general? I know that a typical android phone/tablet's internal storage is usually formatted with different partitions, like the bootloader, system oder data partition,
- Will I need to reformat the internal storage and even install a different bootloader? Or is the preinstalled bootloader usually able to boot any system, not just android?
Of course you don't have to answer all the questions. I'm grateful for any answer that helps me in one of those questions or provides me some information I might want to know in this topic.
Thank you very much :)
