I’ve watched a lot of YouTube over the years of creators with their fancy home assistant dashboard and a few years ago I used a guide to set up one that works for me and importantly had wife approval factor. Since setting it up I’ve tweaked it to my own liking adding badges and functions outside of the original brief and it works very well on my phone. But I’ve always been rather envious of home dashboards that a lot of these guys have setup to control their home and really flaunt their smart home. So, I decided to have a stab at making one on a budget of zero.

Introducing the Linx 1010B

Back in 2016 I bought a Linx 1010 tablet, an extremely affordable convertible tablet that retailed for just £134 on Amazon. Sporting a 1.33Ghz Z3735F Atom processor and a mere 2GB RAM it *ran* Windows 10 but struggled with anything much more complex than basic web browsing. It was a toy and 12 months later I was distracted with becoming a dad. It sat in my office until this year after I was discussing it with a colleague of mine. I pondered, could I get it to run Linux? With the end of Windows 10 looming and the reality that the device was e-waste from the day it was built this could be its time to shine…

For everything else, there’s Linux

Or more specifically. Debian. I first started using Debian at my second IT job, our Head of IT praised its stability, and I think even now would spit on Ubuntu despite its popularity as being a less stable OS. As a result, and for better or worse it became my first choice distribution too. So, this poor little runt of a tablet was getting Debian whether it liked it or not. Which enters the first challenge. This tablet runs 64x but only uses a 32x UEFI which according to the internet presents a problems. Though it turned out to be a non-issue. Forcing the tablet into its boot menu was a breeze, pressing only the power button and volume up rocker on startup. While Linux is not exactly known for its touchscreen compatibility something akin to its Wi-Fi compatibility 15 years ago the interface is rather good and accepted all the usual touch gestures, I’d expect but then…

Wi-Fi woes

At first, signs were looking positive and running Firefox in kiosk mode really meant the work was done but suddenly the wi-fi dropped and I wondered what I’d done wrong. This tablet it turns out uses a thankfully rarely used SDIO connection. For the uninitiated this is a Wi-Fi card that uses SD card interface, something normally reserved for SD card flash storage. I decided to take a punt on a cheap TP-Link USB dongle which claimed Linux compatibility and the net result was a connection that was consistent…ly bad. Slow speeds reminiscent of the early noughties rather than 2024, not good.

Time to Linux

A number of reviews had suggested that compatibility came with the kernel, but that full speed would require drivers, easily attainable from TP-Link. The drivers of course need to be compiled (as is tradition) using the usual array of installing Linux headers, GCC, etc and running make. Unfortunately, the drivers TP-Link provide run into errors which a little Google later suggest are resolved in (RIP) over on. Spoilers, unfortunately no dice! However, never one to be defeated so quickly I continued my research on the errors to discover suggestion that they were fixed in another git repo. Upon running the make command success! But no…

Now the wireless card has disappeared entirely 🙂 time to reinstall Debian the saga continues…