I came across a PACSgear by Hyland DTX 19379 on eBay. It’s a ITX PC system with a built in 7″ WXGA touch screen.
I quickly found the specs for it and I was thinking of ways to use this. Comes with a DFI HM-101 motherboard with a integrated i5-4400E quad core at 3.3GHz, two slots DDR3 SODIMM up to 16GB and has a PCI-E 16 slot. Sadly it doesn’t have NVMe but it does have SATA.
I put in an offer for it and it was accepted. Tossed in 16GB of RAM and a 250GB SSD. I pulled out the capture card and XKeys XK-3 dongle and tossed in the smallest GPU I had on hand. The GPU I used was a old Radeon-550. The touch screen uses LVDS that is built into the motherboard but I wanted the GPU to be used for other things such as a AI model or something.
I had trouble getting Linux running on this correctly. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed worked fine so I could still use the i915 integrated video as the primary video but I wanted something a little more lite weight. Out of the box with Debian I would get a black screen. Best I could tell the i915 driver isn’t friendly with Wayland. I had to go the long way to get things working by installing a minimal copy of Debian and then installed Budgie and LightDM. I was still getting a black screen when it went into Xorg but so far with nomodeset added to the grub bootloader config it works but the nomodeset option disables hardware acceleration. This also disables the hardware acceleration on the AMD GPU as well.
I spent a good day trying kinds of different ways to getting it to work. From using the EDID settings to custom settings. Tried different drivers and even tried to boot Arch Linux. It seems the system is totally fine and I even tried adjusting the brightness via software and nothing. When the system boots into Xorg the screen is black with the backlight on then the backlight turns off. I even went back to OpenSUSE with it and come to find out it automatically set the nomodeset option. Explains why the Llama2 AI model took 10 minutes to answer a simple 2+2 question.
The only way around this is to just get a 40pin LVDS controller and just hook the LCD to the AMD GPU. There is an option to disable the onboard video. The touch diffuser is USB so it should still work fine.
For what it is this would make a very nice Home Assistant server or a lite weight offline AI.