Introduction #
A few years ago, my old OnePlus 6T got discontinued because OnePlus decided it wasn’t getting any security updates anymore. Truly a waste, because there was nothing wrong with the hardware. I threw it in a drawer after buying a new (second hand) phone and never touched it again. Until recently.
This video by Hardware Haven shows it’s possible to install a version of Linux on a select number of phones. By sheer luck, the linux distribution in question, PostmarketOS, officially supports the OnePlus 6T. I used an old MacBook with Linux Mint installed as my installation machine.
Installation steps #
The first step is to unlock the bootloader. This allows a custom operating system to be flashed later. First, install the android-tools package, containing the necessary unlocking and flashing binaries. Connect the phone via USB. Enable developer mode in the Android settings and turn on USB debugging. Restart the phone into flash mode and the bootloader can be unlocked by running
fastboot oem unlock
I had some permission-related issues and ended up having to run the fastboot command as sudo.
Next, download a pre-built PostmarketOS image with a user interface of choice. I picked GNOME as it looked pretty sleek. The official installation guide explains we can flash the image using
fastboot erase dtbo
fastboot flash boot [the file that ends in -boot.img]
fastboot flash userdata [the other file]
fastboot reboot
The phone will now restart and boot into PostmarketOS. The default username and password are user and 147147 respectively.
htop, showing 8GB of memory and 8 threads.The thought of using PostmarketOS as a daily driver does not appeal to me, though. The OS is slow, cluncky and contains bugs. However, that’s not why we’re here! We’re here to run services with Docker.
SSH #
As I’m going to install software through the command line, SSH access would be nice to have. First start the SSH daemon and then enable the service on every boot
sudo systemctl start sshd
sudo systemctl enable sshd
Make sure the device is unplugged and run ip -a to get the devices’ IP address. Now we can ssh in with username and password
Installing Docker and NGINX #
As PostmarketOS is a version of Alpine, it uses the apk package manager. To install Docker, run
apk add docker
Optionally, you can choose to enable the docker service at start up.
To prove Docker is working, we’ll first run an NGINX container with
docker run -p 8080:80 nginx
and then browse to the phone’s ip address on port 8080 in a browser. We’re greeted with the default NGINX page, proving NGINX is working properly.
