The smart TV is a fixture in most houses, variously an entertainment portal, corporate data gathering tool, or sometimes an outright spy. It’s a nice monitor with a computer built in, so can that computer be released to do something else? It’s a question [Xen’on] is answering, on an Android-based TV.

The guide is not too different from many others relating to Android phones, with a few quirks. An Android Debug Bridge (ADB) connection is established, root access is gained using Shizuku, and then it’s a case of installing a more conventional Linux front end with the Openbox window manager through Termux. There are some TV-specific things to do with handling power cycles, but the TV is now a usable Linux box.

It’s always good to see someone retrieve the Linux underneath a locked-down device, but the system spec tells the real story. By the looks of things this TV is a few years old as it had an Android version that’s a bit long in the tooth, and thus it also packs an aged version 4.x kernel. Couple that with a more seat-of-your-pants experience compared to a regular distro where many of the annoyances are taken care of, this isn’t an easy route to a trouble free desktop. Instead it has a lot of potential for making the TV what it was intend to be, an entertainment device. Merely one that gives much more software freedom.

Meanwhile, this isn’t the first Termux guide we’ve seen.