Hardware hackers on Fluther- how to adapt laptop screen to Beagleboard?

I’m actually looking for more general answers here.
I have some parts from older laptops and one touchscreen tablet. I’d like to replace the motherboards and some other guts with a http://beagleboard.org/ or similar.
One problem is that I don’t know how to adapt the skinny signal cable from the old screens to the graphics adapter output on the board. The BeagleBoard in particular has an “LCD Header” which provides “access to the LCD signals”. I’m not sure what this means but it’s clear that there needs to be some logic in the middle to adapt the LCD signals for the particular pinout of the LCD screen involved.
I don’t know how to do this, and I’m not even sure what kinds of keywords or phrases to google to find out.

Here’s hoping that Fluther is a hotbed of hardware hackers who know everything ;^)