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I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation

Current public build (pre-release, May 14, 2026): Run full Debian 12 Bookworm on your Doogee U10 tablet — no bootloader unlock required. Boot from SD card, remove it to return to stock Android. No changes to internal storage. Reverse engineered from scratch — no BSP, no vendor documentation, no official support. Built with the help of Claude , Codex , and Antigravity (Google Gemini), using Firefly RK3562 open-source repositories as a starting point. rkdebian is a build system that produces a complete, bootable Debian 12 Bookworm image for the Doogee U10 Android tablet, powered by the Rockchip RK3562 SoC. The resulting image is written to an SD card. Insert it and power on — the tablet boots Debian. Remove the SD card and it boots Android from internal eMMC as normal. This tablet image supports local LLM inference on the RK3562 NPU using Rockchip's RKLLM stack. Example conversion command (host PC): Measured on April 6, 2026 on with: Warm-run average (runs 2-3): Result: Qwen3-0.6B is significantly faster on this RK3562 tablet for local NPU inference. Host machine: x86-64 Linux (Debian/Ubuntu recommended) Install all build dependencies with: Builds U-Boot, kernel, Debian rootfs, and produces a ready-to-flash SD card image: With full logging to file ( tee ) while preserving the real build exit status: ./build.sh with no target defaults to all . The final image is written to: Compatibility/raw images are also kept: image and updatepkg require existing build artifacts ( out/rootfs , kernel/DTB, and boot config files). These variables can be set before running build.sh to control build behaviour: When changing RKDEBIAN_UI_SESSION or RKDEBIAN_GPU_STACK , use --force-clean-rootfs to avoid stale package carry-over. Images include rk-power-profile-sync.service , which maps Phosh power modes ( power-profiles-daemon ) to cpufreq policy on-device: Tune mapping on-device in /etc/default/rk-power-profile-map . Images include rk-session-failsafe.timer , which checks 5 minutes after boot if a risky session test is still armed. Once the tablet is running Debian, you can apply updates without reflashing the SD card. Build an update package on your host: This produces output/update/update.tar.gz . Copy it to the tablet (via USB, SSH, or any file manager) and drop it in one of these inbox directories: On the next reboot , the rk-apply-update service automatically detects the newest *.tar.gz or *.tgz package, applies rootfs + boot payloads, then reboots to finalize. Legacy compatibility path /update/update.tar.gz is also checked. Package archive behavior: Update progress and errors are logged to /var/log/rk-update.log . If a package fails to apply (corrupt archive, wrong layout) it is moved to /update/failed/ and the system boots normally. After a successful build, flash the compressed image to your SD card: Warning: Double-check the device path. Writing to the wrong device will overwrite your data. Insert the SD card into the Doogee U10 and power it on. Debian will boot automatically. Remove the SD card to return to Android. The build system creates the following accounts in the Debian image: Change these on first boot: The SD card image uses a GPT partition table: The rootfs partition is automatically expanded to fill the SD card on first boot. Third-party components included in this repository: The prebuilt Mali GPU packages in debs/ and the userspace library in mali/ are sourced from: These binaries are provided by those projects under their respective terms. ARM Mali firmware and userspace libraries are proprietary ARM IP. The Rockchip MPP packages in debs/ ( librockchip-mpp1 , librockchip-mpp-dev , librockchip-vpu0 ) are sourced from: Rockchip MPP is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth driver source in overlay/drivers/net/wireless/ea6621q/ and firmware blobs in overlay/firmware/ and wifi/ are provided by Seekwave Technology Co. Ltd . The driver is released by the vendor under the GNU General Public License v2.0 (GPL-2.0). MIT License — © 2026 tech4bot Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. The Linux kernel, U-Boot, Debian packages, Rockchip rkbin, and third-party drivers included in or produced by this build system retain their respective upstream licenses.