So, my cousin picked up a relic from a bygone era at a yardsale.
a Trio Stealth 4.3 inch tablet.
This thing is super underpowered, and comes with completely insufficient internal storage space. AND, like basically all tablets from that era, it mounted an internal nand partition as the internal sdcard. Because they are assholes. Oh yes-- the reason she handed it to me was because it was protected with a lock screen.
SO
3 days later, I have finally tamed this thing as much as it can be tamed.
1) alter vold.fstab so that internal and external SDCards are switched, like they should have been from the damn factory. (this required more than cosmetic corrections, because the chinese tools that programmed this thing did not give complete paths for the actual sdcard's mmc device tree. More on why in a bit.)
2) repartition the real sdcard into 3 partitions: vfat, ext2, swap
3) install playstore as a system app, because it wasnt present. (surprise.)
4) install link2SD so we can get around the garbage internal storage limitation. (reason for ext2 partition.)
5) install swapper2 so we can get a swap partition running.
6) update the built-in busybox with something more... complete. (and nearly brick the device a few times doing it, since it needs busybox to boot. Really.)
7) install MXPlayer media player (I suspect she will just use it for movies or something, and a media player that can leverage hardware decoders is damn skippy, especially on something this weak.)
I am pretty happy with it now. Well, as happy as I can be with an obsolete android 4.0.4 device, with under 1gb of ram, and a single core processor, without using a custom kernel for zram.
Why dont these things come from the factory properly kitted? I mean, this one DID ship with a su binary...