Beaglebone Seeed green (custom LCD read post) GUI

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FWIW: I had to delete my other post, but after some offline discussion, I’m OK to proceed. I have NO support from the manufacturer.

Unit 1: Bbeaglebone Black with HDMI - can install a new OS and good to go
Unit 2: Seeed Studio Beaglebone Green Industrial with custom LCD/Touchsreeen

UNIT 2:
Device has a modified Debian Jessie OS. By design it starts Qtopia?. The board is a Beagleboard Green from Seeed Studio so no HDMI. I tried installing lxqt but apt doesn’t know where to find it.

At this point I’ve got CLI/SSH access to the device (root to boot, to boot). I don’t have the original Beagleboard webserver files, that’s gone. In place is a custom HMI. I’m free to do whatever I want to it. I’d like to get a GUI on it, it is a touchscreen LCD, since the default GUI only starts a VNC session.

Since I don’t know what’s special about getting the LCD working (*.dtb) , I’m happy to stay with the OS that’s on it and working with the LCD and OS that’s there.

While I understand that the Beaglebone runs Debian I’m not sure what is needed to get to more a “default install” with GUI via LCD and possibly webserver.

My concern is that overwriting it the OS with a new one (bone-debian-9.9-lxqt-armhf-2019-08-03-4gb.img.gz) will lose what makes the LCD work. I tried this didn’t work well, had to dd a different unit to get this one working again.

Call to Action:
Get lxqt? GUI running on LCD, probably can’t run Doom
Get the default webserver (Cloud 9) running

Play around with GPIO, make a light blink, Hello World, watermelon

End Goal:

  1. Halloween decoration: “Zombie containment field breached” on HMI (cool graphics), flashing red light, GPIO to trigger some sparky/arcy devices. Pump to pump liquid through tubes.
  2. Home automation
  3. take over the world
  4. Play Doom on a touchscreen

YOU:
Suggestions, tips, tricks. etc.

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*UNIT 2:*
Device has a modified Debian Jessie OS. By design it starts Qtopia?. The
board is a Beagleboard Green from Seeed Studio so no HDMI. I tried
installing lxqt but apt doesn't know where to find it.

  Jessie is old enough that the graphical desktop was probably LXDE, not
LXQT.

My concern is that overwriting it the OS with a new one
(bone-debian-9.9-lxqt-armhf-2019-08-03-4gb.img.gz) will lose what makes
the LCD work. I tried this didn't work well, had to dd a different unit to
get this one working again.

  Stretch is pretty old too. Current OS is based on Buster (Debian 10.x).

  So DON'T overwrite (flash) the eMMC -- run an SD card image directly
until you verify that it does what you want. THEN convert the card to a
flasher to update the eMMC.

  Note: depending upon just how old that Jessie image is, you may have to
use the boot-select button when applying power to the board. I believe it
was sometime late in the Jessie period that u-Boot was modified to
automatically switch to the SD card. Also take note of the fact that Jessie
is still in the "Linux kernel loads device tree overlays" -- for some time
now, it is u-boot that loads the overlays, so updating the eMMC by some
means that doesn't update the u-boot will cause problems.

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LXDE makes more sense, thank you.
While the newer version of Debian will run the LCD doesn’t work even if I copy the .dtbs from the original and update the uEnv.txt file to load them.
This has been my reason for not updating it, yet. I will have to pull the unit apart and see if I can what chips are on the LCD to figure out how to drive it.
It appears to be using the LCD pins on the GPIO.