I want to put this old Fujitsu tablet to use. This Fujitsu tablet was originally used for controlling manufacturing equipment, but since it's now very obsolete, I have found myself in possesion of a few. This tablet came out in the early 2000's and came pre-installed with Microsoft 2000 Enterprise. I was enchanted by it's capabilities and it's potential for a project. A few months ago, I knew little to nothing about Linux, but wanted to learn more. This tablet seemed like a perfect opportunity. My goal for this was to install linux and create a terminal like ui to practice c programming on and for very limited hardware. This article will be more of an expedited version of what worked. There was an incredible amount of learning, trial, and error. This project took me probably at least 24 hours in total to get to the point I'm currently at.

After some research I found a few forum pages of people doing this exact project! This gave me a lot of hope, because then I knew it was at least possible, even though it was really hard.

First, I needed to prepare the HDD for an OS installation. The HDD's that come with the tablets are 15GB IDE drives. Luckily the person I got the tablet from also had an IDE to USB adapter so I could connect the drive to my computer. Once connected I used an admin terminal to clean the disk, and minitool partition wizard to format it. I allocated 2gb for a swap partition and the rest ~13gb as an ext4 (Linux) partition.

I downloaded the most current version (as of fall 2024) of CorePlus 15.0, and used rufus to make a bootable usb drive.

After booting from the USB on my PC, I installed TinyCore onto the HDD with wifi, wireless firmware, and ezremaster. Next I boot from the HardDrive and install the packages

            flwm.tcz          Fast light window manager for UI
            fltk-1.3.tcz		  Fast light toolkit
            fltk-1.3-dev.tcz	Dev tools for FLTK
            compiletc		      C/C++ compiler
            Xorg-7.7.tcz		  Display package for future touchscreen use
            

I tested a Hello, World! script and restarted the device. I got a failed in waitforx error on boot amd couldn't load into the UI. After some research and searching through the logs for errors with cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep -i "EE" (which means display the text in this file-the error log- marked as an error-EE-), I discovered a lack of video driver was the problem. The GPU the Fujitsu uses is a Trident Cyber 9525, so I googled that with 'fx86' 'linux' and 'driver'. The first result was a phronix article on Xorg drivers updated for old trident graphics. Using another USB I configured and installed it from the terminal. I also had to make an Xorg configure file and edited it based on someone elses Xorg.conf file they had uploaded to a puppy linux forum.

I ran startx and to my surprise and relief, it loaded into TinyCore. I was elated. I tested a few little programs and made some setting changes, and restarted the device to make sure it still worked.

It did not still work. Failed in waitforx read underneath the linux penguin.

I ended up doing this 3 or 4 times before it worked. I found out that, on TinyCore, only 2 directories are backedup and persistant between restarts, and neither of them were where the video driver installed. The fix I went with was adding the directories the drivers were installed to to the backup list.

That's about where I'm at now. This is the first part of the goal I had when I started this project, which was get linux installed and working on the tablet.

Going forward, I'm going to try and get the touchscreen working.