Linux on Fujitsu Stylistic 1200

Written by Administrator, on 27-10-2007 11:18

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The Fujitsu Stylistic 1200 is a pen computer, the ancestor of modern tablet PC. It's an interesting device for hacker or people interrested by embedded computers because it is very cheap (~35Euros - 30 USD on ebay) and there are lots of extention ports available.

What is it?

Here is a picture of the computer running debian Sarge and connected to a microcontroler experimentation board (this tablet looks ideal to build a domotic system)

How to install linux

There is no CD nor floppy drive, so the best way to install a system is to put the hard drive in a laptop or a PC with a 2.5" -> 3.5" adapter.
Its easy to install a basic debian 3.1 system with the hard drive in a host laptop, and later its possible to complete the installation with apt, with the hard drive in the tablet and connected to network with a PCMCIA adapter.

You can find lots of interested informations about linux and freebsd on Stylistic in this page, I will just add some things about the X configuration and the pen.
The pen is an active pen (with a battery) seen with the serial interface /dev/ttyS3. Unfortunatly this serial port is not automatically well configured at boot time. Its necessary to install the setserial package and to run the following command:

 setserial /dev/ttyS3 irq 15 port 0xfce8 baud_base 115200 uart 16450

A simple way is to put the line /dev/ttyS3 irq 15 port 0xfce8 baud_base 115200 uart 16450 in /etc/serial.conf and to run /etc/init.d/setserial at startup.
The XWindow configuration in pretty easy because the active pen is well supported by fpit driver. You can download my configuration file XF86Config-4 for xfree 4, it's probably compatible with xorg.

Interesting lines are:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "pen"
Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS3"
Driver "fpit"
Option          "CorePointer"
Option "BaudRate" "19200"
Option "MaximumXposition" "6400"
Option "MaximumYposition" "5100"
Option "InvertY"
EndSection
Please note that calibration have been done 'manualy' and maybe can be improved for your tablet.

Keywords : Embedded computing, Linux on Fujitsu Stylistic 1200, linux, tablet PC, microcontroler, domotic