Gh0ul's Lair

About

Repurposing a Fujitsu Stylistic LT C-500

In Progress

The purpose of this project is to bring new life to old tech! The main goal is to repurpose a tablet to a digital picture frame.
I was given a bunch of these old tablets, and after taking apart one and playing around with the stock Windows 2000 Enterprise OS, I discovered these devices are just too cute to recycle.
To make this, I used:
  • TinyCore. A *tiny* Linux distrobution to keep the old hardware running well with it's limitations.
  • MiniTool Partition Wizard. Disk manager on Windows doesn't have the ability to format drives in EXT4 (Linux' file format), so this program is required.
  • Rufus. To flash the OS to a USB to install on the drive.
  • Xorg 7.7. A driver essential for getting the touchscreen working
  • Video-Trident-1.4. A video driver required for Xorg to work.
  • Compiletc. TinyCores C/C++ compiler, which was needed to compile the video driver
  • USB drive. To install the OS and upload the photos.
  • IDE to USB adapter To connect the drive it came with to a PC.

This project has been more hiccups than successes, but this is the progress I've made so far.

November 14, 2024

Got 6 of these devices from a friend who got them from a bracket factory. First step is prepairing the drive. They came with 15GB IDE HDD's. Using the drive adapter, I cleaned the disk in command prompt, and formatted it to Ext4 using MiniTool. I made 2 paritions and flashed an ISO to one of them, and then spent an embarrasing amount of time trying to install the OS onto the other partition. It didn't work, ever. After being defeated one too many times, I used a USB drive, and it was quick and painless, other than realizing I wasted hours of my time.

November 15, 2024

I tried a bunch of different OS's, but ultimatly went with TinyCore. It's extremely lightweight and of course, Tiny (only xMB!), So I'll have plenty of space for my photos. To get full functionality of the touchscreen and stylus, I need Xorg, and it was a pain to install. It wouldn't even boot into the OS after installation, and came up with a mountain of errors in the terminal. Sorting through the error logs, I discovered the problem was a missing GPU driver.

November 21, 2024

Nowhere in my research did I find what graphics card it had, let alone what driver it needed. Luckily one of the first things I did when I got thses devices is take one apart. Analyzing the motherboard, I found these devices have a Trident Cyber9525DVD GPU, and fortunatly someone had made a Linux compatable driver for it. I though I had made a huge breakthrough, I put it on a USB and just moved it over to the drive, and spoilers, it didn't work. I found out I needed to install a C++ compiler and manually compile it in the terminal. Finally though, it worked!! I was so elated I had to do a little dance. After fixing some settings, and exploring TC a little bit, I turned it off, feeling satisfied with my progresss.

November 22, 2024

Turned it on, and what comes up? The termianl, with seemingly endless errors. I took a breath and recompiled the GPU driver, got into the OS, restarted, and boom. Back to square one. The distress was unreal. After doing that same thing a few more times, I did some more research and found that the driver probably wasn't set to open on startup. I navigated to the file that tells it which startup apps to open, and added the driver. Restarted. SUCCESS!!!

June 22, 2025

It's been awhile since I've worked on this project. I had to move and then started like 5 other projects while it sat in storage for a few months. My goal for this year is to get it functional. I'll have to find a good photo display program or make something simple on my own. We'll see. Stay tuned!

It still consistently boots into the OS, but it doesn't have any working Wi-Fi or stylus drivers. It needs some work, but I'm making good progress.

I've got big dreams for this little device, and I will make them come true. It would be nice to not have to use a mouse to change pictures, so next I'm going to focus on getting the stylus to work. After that I may try and get it working with Wi-Fi, but that will probably require a Linux compatable PCMCIA network card. I have a few, but I haven't been able to find any drivers for them. When those 1 or 2 things are out of the way, I'll work on cosmetic alterations. Maybe repaint it, add some RGB for fun. I'm not sure yet, but I've got a long way until I get to that point anyway.
This was a lofty project for me, as I had never even booted up Linux before this. The biggest challenge was definitely getting the graphics driver to work. The most satisfying thing to learn was the Linux terminal commands and how to troubleshoot errors and compile stuff. I would defintely reccomend anyone whose interested in learning about old hardware and Linux to try a project like this. Happy tinkering!
Resources
  • Owners manual
  • All of the materials
  • forum posts