I was given a bunch of these devices, so I decided to install Linux on one. It took a lot of trial and error but I've finally done it \(*-*)/. This post will be about what worked.

Fujitsu Stylistic LT C-500 with stand and stylus

Preparing the hard drive was the first step. These tablets come with a 15GB HDD. I connected it to my PC and made a backup of everything on the drive. Afterwards, cleaned it with an Admin termninal and fdisk, then formatted it with MiniTool. I allocated 2GB as a swap partition, which Linux can use as virtual RAM, since this Fujistu only has 256MB of real RAM.

Actual Fujitsu Ram

Using a 4GB thumb drive, and Rufus, a disk imaging tool, I created a bootable drive with CorePlus 15.0. Next I installed TC with wifi support, and wifi firmware. Now booting from the installed TinyCore, I open a terminal, connect to the internet, and install a few drivers for later use:

  • > fast light window manager, fltk-1.3 and fltk-1.3-dev to create the UI

  • > Xorg-7.7 for future touchscreen configuration

  • > compiletc, a C/C++ compiler

  • > video-trident-1.4* - open source graphics driver and needed for Xorg to work

The graphics driver was downloaded on my PC and loaded onto a thumb drive. Then I had to use makefiles and manually edit Xorg's configure file to get the driver working. The configure file I based the edits on is from this forum:

Linux penguin gif

That's about where I'm at for now. Finished the first big step of the project without really knowing too much about Linux or drivers. A lot of this detail is probably stuff the average Linux user knows, but I wanted to include the info as I learned it, because I didn't know about most of this existed before I started this project.