Hey,

Coming in hot with the 3rd small project.

My wife has a very old phone (Poco something) that she no longer uses. So I decided to see if I can turn it into a small home server (I already have a MiniPC that serves that purpose but is static). Turns out - one can do that super easy. Here is what’s required:

Steps

1. Clean up the phone - Factory reset etc.
2. Download Termux - I did that from F-Droid
3. Set it up.

Setup

After the installation there are a few highly recommended things to do:

1. Make sure that Android doesn’t terminate termux - Just go to the app settings and disable battery save stuff etc. (dependent on your Android )
2. Update the packages pkg update & pkg upgrade
3. (Optional) Install SSH so you can do what you want to do on a proper keyboard
   1. Install: pkg install openssh
   2. Set pass: passwd
   3. Find user: whoami
   4. Get IP: ifconfig

Once you’re done - you should be good to go.

Additional Stuff

Some additional things that I did is to setup Claude. It was a bit of a pain since the phone has an arm64 processor and it was not supported. So I ended up having to use a Termux Patch Wrapper to do that. At the end I successfully managed to set it up and make a simple webpage that runs on a Node static server.

Future Plans

As one can imagine what can be done here is endless. One of the useful things that I could think of is run an Emby-Server and store the media files there. I also have an old Chromecast on which (hopefully) I can run an Emby client and take my media files on the Go and hook them up to a TV or stream on a laptop. But that…. Might be a future project. P.S. I’m pretty sure that I’ll find problems down the line which I’ll need to figure out as I go.

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What I learned: That you can run a server on a phone and take it with you anywhere. I’m pretty sure that I can even run an Android HotSpot and be able to connect to it directly from a PC (somehow… will figure out later)