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Comment by 9t3h4r3o5w1a4w2 | Hacker News Reader

I have at least 4 Android phones that have either a broken screen (but still usable) or are just too old to run a recent version of Android. Anybody knows how can I use them as computers or even servers? how to connect them to the network without using wifi? they obviously don't come with a network port.

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A USB to ethernet adapter will probably work for a wired connection.[1]

Gambiting mentioned elsewhere in the comments that you can install GNURoot from the Play store and run Linux along side Android.

I imagine there is, or soon will be, specific projects to pare down AOSP to the minimum required to run a server without all the extra stuff (that is, the Android part on top of Linux).

1: http://plugable.com/2015/01/22/new-plugable-usb-fast-etherne...

If you plug them into a Linux machine and turn on tethering they will show up as the ethernet interface usbx or so. You can then use dhclient to get an address (although you'll want to make sure it doesn't change your default gateway) or assign a reasonable address yourself.

Terminal IDE (on old phones) or termux on new ones should have enough packages to do whatever you want.

You can also grab any rootfs with the right arch and chroot into it if you have root. You can even static link busybox/dropbear and have most of the things you would use on a small server.

This sounds like a good rasberrypi project. A ways to plug in multiple android phones through usb and get access to the processing power and filesystem offered by the phone in a generic clustered configuration.

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