So I’ve made a one off project for a piece of hardware that was sent to me. I’ve gotten Debian 13 and OpenMediaVault 8 running on the LincStation E1, and put the installer and documentation on GitHub. The E1 is a Rockchip RK3568-based NAS with 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of eMMC storage. It ships with Android underneath LincOS, a rather... incomplete OS. What isn’t incomplete is Linux.

Getting there involved Android debugging, gaining root through the bundled aria2 download service, and building boot images the existing bootloader could understand. The bootloader was already unlocked, which helped considerably. Getting the thing to reliably reboot took a device-tree fix. Booting Linux is one thing; having it come back after a restart is a fairly useful feature for a NAS.

What works?

Debian boots from the internal eMMC, with working 2.5 GbE, both SATA bays, fan control, and OpenMediaVault's web interface. You can keep it headless or install an LXDE desktop with HDMI output and VNC. Kernel updates work through apt, with a hook that rebuilds the boot image. There's also a recovery boot slot.

The big caveat: this is experimental. The migration worked on one E1, but the reusable installer hasn't been run end to end on a second stock unit yet. NVMe hasn't been tested, and power-off, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and hardware video decoding still need validation. Back up before attempting this; replacing the firmware can brick your NAS.

If you have an E1 and feel like tinkering, start with the full installation guide. It's all on GitHub, including the migration scripts and notes on what has actually been tested.